Sister of Mine

Sister of Mine by Laurie Petrou is a 2018 Crooked Lane publication.

A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves- a special kind of double. -Toni Morrison

This book explores a much more complicated sisterly relationship than most, which creates a taut, atmospheric environment, with tension building and building, finally reaching a riveting breaking point.

Penny’s husband becomes abusive which, in total desperation, causes her to pull her younger sister, Hattie, into a scheme to rid herself of him before he kills her.

While it appears as though their plan has gone off without a hitch, the relief they are expecting never materialized. Instead, they have traded one unbearable situation for another, as show more the dynamic between the sisters begins to shift, slowly at first, but becoming more pronounced as time passes. However, as sisters, they are bound together by their terrible secret.

But, when a private investigator takes an interest in the case the tension becomes even more miserable. In addition, Hattie tries to move on with her life by marrying and trying to start her own family, which creates an atmosphere akin to a pressure cooker.

Will Penny and Hattie ever find peace? Will their sins finally catch up with them?

This book is marketed as a domestic thriller. It does fit into that category, but not in the traditional sense. There is a crime, but we know, beginning with the first chapter, who is murdered, why, and how. The suspense comes from the aftermath, and it’s not so much a cat and mouse game, although that element does factor in, but the sense of foreboding that hangs in the air, that feeling that something is about to implode or explode, and when it does, it won’t be pretty.

In some ways this book is an interesting character study as well as a complex exploration of sisterly bonds and duty, which can be as mysterious and complex as the mother/daughter relationship.

The rivalry is paralleled by the sacrifices one makes for the other, and the loyalty that was once more freely given, that is now forced.

It’s a strange, almost claustrophobic feeling at times, but the author did an amazing job at developing the suspense with precision timing and pacing. Once all is said and done, it seems to me this novel defies classification. The story is as much of a family drama as it is a thriller. The 'for fans of' Liane Moriarity comparison is a bit of a stretch, in my opinion, but, overall, this is a nice, fresh, and original debut novel.

I appreciated the unique take on sisterhood, and the interesting approach to the domestic thriller trope. This was quick and easy read for me, but it took me by surprise, in a good way.
This is an author I’d like to hear from again.
4 stars show less

Penny and Hattie are two sisters living in a small Canadian town. They share a deep dark secret: they were involved in the fire that led to the death of Buddy, Penny’s abusive husband. Will they be able to keep the secret when other people enter their lives and complicate their already complex relationship?

Penny is the narrator. She lives with the constant fear that Hattie will divulge what happened in the fire so she lives with her sister and watches her carefully. Having to live like this causes her to resent her sister. Then Jameson, a charming man, becomes a regular visitor to their home, and both women are attracted to him. Will jealousy sever the sisters’ bond of loyalty? And then there are the external threats (Buddy’s best show more friend and a police officer who keeps dropping by) whose intrusions add to the tension. Will the secret be uncovered and destroy their lives?

Though there is a mystery included in the book, its focus is very much the bond between sisters. The two love each other very much, as evidenced in their actions at the beginning and end of the book, but theirs is not a simple relationship. As with many siblings, there is some rivalry. Hattie is the prettier one and everyone is drawn to her outgoing personality: “I had been here before. I had seen the eyes of someone I loved shift towards my sister. I recognized the boiling hate that would start as a simmer but become a fire.” As the older one, Penny feels an obligation to look after her younger sister: “She was a magnet to me and I to her; I hated that I couldn’t help but love her, hated that this love made me feel obligated to protect her. Sometimes wishing I was an only child.” At one point, upset with Hattie’s behaviour, Penny imagines her sister dead: “I lay and wished away my darling girl. I even saw myself, grief-stricken at her funeral, genuinely heartsick about her death. I love her, I loved her, I hate her, I hated her.”

Neither of the two girls is particularly likeable. Though their mother is dead, Penny yearns for her mother’s approval, feeling that Hattie was the favoured child. And Penny even blames Hattie’s “self-absorption” for their mother’s death and for an earlier family tragedy. As an adult, Penny seriously betrays her sister (leading to another big secret to be kept) and even pushes Hattie out of their childhood home: “I stood, hands on hips, and surveyed the room. I had won. I was back where I belonged, and all was good. Fortune had smiled on me because I knew, truly in my heart, what was right, what was my right, and I took it.”

Though we know Hattie only from Penny’s perspective and so have to be aware of bias, Hattie is not a sympathetic character either. Hattie obviously feels a great deal of guilt for her role in the fire that killed Buddy, but she also feels that Penny owes her. When she asks Penny for a major favour, this feeling comes to the fore: “’Penny, come on! . . . Everything I’ve done has been for you! . . . Don’t you feel like you owe a little back to me? . . . I need this, Penny. This is what I want. What I deserve.’” Hattie’s choices involving Elliot also make it difficult to like her.

I do not have a sister but the intricate relationship between sisters described in the book rings true. Most siblings may not have such a dark secret, but love, envy, and long-held resentments are part of many sibling relationships.

Note: Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski). show less

Since their father walked out of the family home during their childhood the Grayson sisters have shared a powerful if, at times, ambivalent bond. Quiet, self-contained Penny has always felt protective of her younger sister Hattie, whilst at the same time envying her sibling’s beauty and her sunnier, carefree personality. Following the sudden death of their mother, when Penny was nineteen and Hattie sixteen, Penny is appointed her sister’s guardian. Although she had recently started at college and was beginning to enjoy a sense of freedom from family responsibilities, she feels she has no option but to return to the family home to care for Hattie. Giving up on her dreams of freedom, she now feels a strong need to find ways of show more adapting to her changed circumstances, to fit into her community, the small Canadian town of St Margaret’s. When she meets Buddy, and quickly marries him, she believes that he will not only love and care for her, but that he will share some of the responsibility for her sister. Although the couple move into their own home, Hattie continues to live in the family home but, as it is close by, there is frequent contact between the two households. However, it quickly becomes apparent that Buddy is controlling and abusive and Penny feels trapped and fearful. Eventually the sisters become complicit in a plan to set a house fire which will leave Buddy dead, and Penny free to return to live with Hattie. They now share a dark secret and although in many ways this reinforces their bond, it also threatens to drive them apart because, whilst Penny, ever-fearful that their crime will be uncovered, is eager to minimise contact with residents of the town, the more outgoing Hattie wants to be more sociable, to be able to invite friends to their home. Through her job as director of the local day-care centre Penny meets the handsome, charismatic Jameson Leung, when he takes a teaching job at the attached school and, feeling an immediate attraction, she decides to act uncharacteristically and invite him for dinner. Inevitably he falls for Hattie’s charms and although Penny decides to not only accept, but also encourage their relationship, she struggles with her jealousy over their increasing closeness.
Penny is the narrator of this powerful story of an intense sibling relationship, one which is made much more complex by the deadly secret the two sisters are keeping, their joint fear that the death of Buddy will be reinvestigated and the many ways in which the presence of Jameson creates new rivalries, secrets and tensions. In the years that follow the bond between these three characters becomes increasingly entangled as the balance of power shifts from one sister to the other, and Jameson’s role in this ménage a trois becomes ever-more significant. The need to preserve the secrets of the past becomes more urgent and yet it feels increasingly inevitable that these secrets will be revealed, with far-reaching and devastating consequences for everyone.
Through Penny’s reflections on her life – her fears, her hopes, and all her ambivalent feelings about Hattie – I soon found myself drawn into the neurotic-symbiosis of the relationship between the sisters. The author very convincingly evoked the powerful love/hate elements of many sibling relationships, ambivalences which became increasingly skewed as a result of the dreadful secrets Penny and Hattie were forced to keep. She captured the constantly shifting power-struggles between the sisters, as well as the envy, the guilt, the rage, the resentments, the grief, the loyalty – and the love – each of them brought to their co-dependent relationship. Although I didn’t feel particularly drawn to either of them, I think this was probably a reflection of the realistic ways in which the author explored their relationship, revealing how each played a part in the dilemmas they faced. Neither was portrayed as either entirely guilty or blameless, instead there was a recognition that each of them needed to acknowledge, and face up to, the responsibility they bore for the decisions they made.
With the ever-present question about what exactly happened on the night Buddy died forming a continuous thread through the story, the author created a tension-filled psychological thriller which felt increasingly haunting and claustrophobic and one which I found difficult to put down. Although there are some (rather predictable) twists in the plot, essentially this is a character-driven story, reliant on the credibility of the characters’ interactions to make it memorable. It was this psychological integrity, combined with the Laurie Petrou’s eloquent prose, which made this a very satisfying read for me. I think it is a remarkable debut novel and I’ll be looking out for the author’s next book.
With thanks to NB for a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review. show less

Sister of Mine is a multi layered novel about two sisters, Penny and Hattie, who are tied together by a dark secret. This secret rips them apart as the years go by because of resentments, lies, cover-ups and bad memories.

As the story opens, their mother who raised them died in an accident at home while Penny was away at college. Giving up her dreams of finishing school, Penelope comes back home after the death of her mother to take care of her younger sister Hattie. She gets a steady job and marries a local man who turns out to be an abuser. Terrified of her husband and what he is capable of Penny sees only one way to escape him. When her husband is found dead in a house fire, the two sisters just want to get on with their lives and show more leave his memory behind.

Living in their old family home now with Hattie’s boyfriend Jameson, the trio wants to live a normal small town life. Penny as the eldest has always been the responsible one, and she both loves and resents Hattie at times, just like real sisters do. As the story flows, a dark secret between these two sisters eats them up and they realize the investigation into the death of Penny’s husband is not over. However, the investigation is the least of their worries, it is the secret that festers between them that consumes their lives.

I enjoyed Sister of Mine very much. I was easily swept away inside these pages. the writing was engaging and the story-line was fraught with tension at times. There are supporting characters in the plot but the story is mainly about Hattie and Penny and the two of them trying to make sense of what happened and trying to live normal lives. Without giving away too much, there is a character, a young boy, and he just brings the past back to life for the sisters. He becomes like living, breathing evidence of the their past but he is also their salvation. The sisters weave a tangled web of lies and I can’t say I liked either one of them, but there is closure at the end of the story.

I have a sister myself, I’m the eldest by almost five years and I found that Laurie Petrou gets the complicated sister dynamic very well. At the end of the day, no one really knows you like your sister does right? It’s a special bond.

disclaimer: This review is my honest opinion. I did not receive any kind of compensation for reading and reviewing this book. I am under no obligation to write a positive review. I received my free copy of Sister of Mine by Laurie Petrou via Meryl Moss Media.

read my full review here
https://bookwormnai.wordpress.com/2018/08/18/sister-of-mine-by-laurie-petrou/ show less

This novel becomes more interesting as it progresses. Two sisters, Penny and Hattie, are abandoned by their father and then their mother dies, leaving them alone in the family home as teenagers. Penny marries into an abusive relationship, which ends tragically. Hattie becomes enamored of a man who teaches with Penny. When they are unable to conceive a child, Hattie turns to Penny with unexpected consequences. There is a gradual unraveling of secrets, lies and deceptions in a slowly untangling web that haunts their lives and, ultimately, changes everything except the sisters' bond with each other.

This was an interesting look at how you can love and hate a sibling at the same time and the bond between sisters. I had a bit of trouble with this book as I have a fantastic relationship with my sisters and had trouble imagining a relationship like these two sisters had - plus I really didn't like either sister and neither of them were able to get my sympathy. That said, I found this an interesting look at how secrets can ruin a relationship even among sisters.

Penny and Hattie are sisters in a small town where everyone knows everyone else's business and will hold things against people for years. Both girls were bullied in school after their father left the family and that made their bond with each other even stronger. Penny always show more looked after Hattie and tried to take care of her, especially after their mother died in a freak accident. The story is told by Penny when she moved back into the family home after her abusive husband is killed in a fire. The secrets that the two sisters share about this fire, makes their relationship even more of a love/hate relationship. It seems as if they love each other but much of the time don't really like each other. How long can they keep the secret about the fire before the truth comes out and their relationship is broken?

This was an interesting look at love within a family and how secrets can affect everyone involved with the family.

Thanks to the publisher for a copy of this book to read and review. All opinions are my own. show less

Keep your enemies close and your sister closer. Hattie and Penny are typical sisters. Sometimes they love each other and sometimes they don’t. Like all sisters they share many secrets. Penny goes off to college, meets Buddy, gets married and moves back to her hometown. Buddy becomes abusive to Penny and she wants out. With the help of Hattie she hatches a plan to burn her house down with Buddy inside. This secret binds the sisters for life. This book is the tale of what secrets can do to sisters and how far they will go to repay debts. Penny is the older sister who seems more dependable and down to earth. Hattie is the spoiled baby sister, outgoing and irresponsible. Neither sister is particularly likeable, but this well written book show more kept me reading to find out the secrets. Following a rather twisted path the book reaches a satisfying conclusion. As a mystery it had some inconsistencies especially with the investigation of the fire but as a dark psychological thriller it hit the mark. I look forward to reading more from Laurie Petrou. I want to thank Netgalley and the publisher for allowing me to read this book. I
was under no obligation to leave a positive review. show less