Not my favourite of the Seven Sisters books but still a great read.

The 6th book is the seven sisters collection. While I have NO idea if my distaste for the last few books has to do with the laziness of writing getting worse and worse or if the fun and newness of the stories are now old and I can see the writing and storylines as they are now but I was only kind of MEH about the last few in the series. I feel like the first two books were much stronger. The dialogue started to feel mechanical more than natural. I didn’t really have an issue with the style of writing and her back and forth between past and present but many of the times the book just felt awkward. Also honestly cared the LEAST about this sister so I didn’t seem to care about her struggles really. She didn’t have a lot of depth to her. I will read the last book because it’s the end of the series and I feel like there’s a mystery still to be discovered but I may find myself skipping chapters or conversations when they get too tedious. It’s a enjoyableish read. That’s about it. Nothing really Wow.

Starting the year tearing into a story

Every book in the Seven Sisters series follows the life of an individual member of the fictional D’Apliese family, each sister having been adopted into the family many years before. Each one focuses on the current day timeline, while reverting back to firsthand accounts of events that took place generations earlier. Readers are taken all over the world, to recognisable landmarks, famous names, and some crucial historical turning points throughout the twentieth century. You can’t read these books in a hurry as they take their time to unravel their accounts, and even longer to show how they all link together.

From the very beginning, the story has obvious gaps left wide open for us to be curious about and so we know there is more to this family than first meets the eye. For a mystery geek like me, that meant that right from the beginning I kept a running list of questions that I needed answering, and I wasn’t disappointed. Some of the mysteries are wrapped up in each individual book, and others had to wait until the final book to be confirmed.

There are two things to overlook while reading them. One is how far-fetched these connections seem to be - you just need to suspend your disbelief and roll with it. The final book does a great job of helping us understand why it’s okay to just accept how things happened. The other thing is the quality of the dialogue, both between the characters and internally for each protagonist. I found it really grating and cliched, which is why these are not five star books for me. But the stories themselves, the research that clearly went into them, and the kind of master plan required for all of them individually and together - that’s what’s deserving of the time to read all of these books, and what made me immediately go back and devour them all again as soon as I’d finished the last one!

This was an audiobook of over 26 hours. I would have not finished it otherwise. The story could definitely do with some editing by at least a third! I enjoyed the of Cecile and Kenya but I found electra intensely annoying and the reader of her part didn’t help. I found her voice very whingey and annoying.