08 July 2013

Life's a beach

Better late than never we got around to discussing the Sea Sisters by Lucy Clarke at our last meeting.  I say that as we won a set of copies through a competition on The Reading Agency book group site and were due to post reviews way back at the beginning of June.

For those who haven't read it here's an introduction and excerpt from the book from The Reading Agency, Reading Groups for Everyone site;  There are some currents in the relationship between sisters that run so dark and so deep, it's better for the people swimming on the surface never to know what's beneath...

Katie's carefully structured world is shattered by the news that her headstrong younger sister, Mia, has been found dead in Bali - and the police claim it was suicide. With only the entries of Mia's travel journal as her guide, Katie retraces the last few months of her sister's life, and - page by page, country by country - begins to uncover the mystery surrounding her death.What she discovers changes everything. But will her search for the truth push their sisterly bond - and Katie - to breaking point?

‘Mia, you seemed so happy. What changed? You were experiencing all those incredible things with 
Finn, yet ended up in Bali alone. Why were you on that cliff top in the dead of night? Were you 
thinking about what I’d said? Did you do it, Mia? Did you jump? God, Mia, what happened to you?’

First things first, the cover and title.  We weren't overly impressed by either and we felt we wouldn't have picked up a copy based on either of them.  The title could refer to anything, mermaids anyone? And we felt as the title was the sea sisterS (plural) it should have had two (better) images on the front cover.  On the subject of formatting Jenny noticed that the type set throughout the book didn't leave enough room for apostrophes so a lot of the shortened words read wrong, for example she'd read as shed.  Which as soon as you notice it is very frustrating! 

But in saying that the story was good and makes for an enjoyable, easy read. Perfect for your holidays.  We discussed our initial thoughts as to what may have happened to Mia and it was interesting as we all had a different opinion to what could have happened from the very start and enjoyed the tale unraveling.  We discussed the role of the sisters in the book and although it was felt we didn't learn anything new about a sister sister relationship we did agree it wouldn't have worked as sister brother or even as brother brother which was reflected by other characters. 
 
You can read the reviews Jan and I posted to the Reading Agency here  and on Amazon here.

As usual feel free to post comments or thoughts below or onto our Facebook page here, or tweet using #BuilthBooks.

Next months meeting take place on Wednesday 7th August at 7pm, Builth Wells library and we'll be discussing Phillip Pullman 'The good man Jesus and the scoundrel Christ.' 

We also won a another set of books from The Reading Agency, The Gravity of Birds by Tracy Guzeman, which will be discussed in September's meeting.