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?
This is the first Richard and Judy Summer
Book Club 2013 that I have read this year and I think it was a great first
read. Especially as I actually read it on holiday J.
Katie and Mia are two very different
sisters. Katie is the sensible, must do it right one (sounds a bit like me!)
and Mia is the more reckless of the two, the one that just does what she likes,
but knows at the same time that she is mucking things up.
The story is told from Katie and Mia’s
viewpoints- each chapter alternates between them. I like it when stories do
this as it really gives the reader a true understanding of the main characters
and their relationships with each other. It was also really interesting to see the
aftermath of conversations and arguments the characters had had with each other
when alone.
Mia sees Katie as the sensible one and
always thought that Katie was better than her in everyway. There was always a
niggling doubt in Mia’s mind about how they could possibly be related. Katie on
the other hand just can’t seem to understand why her sister acts so aloof and
unfeeling at one point exclaiming ‘I don’t know who you are.”
I thought the below sentence really summed
up the older-younger sister relationship (from the older sister’s perspective):
“I was handed the role of older sister:
sensible, protective reliable. You were handed younger sister: wild,
independent, selfish”.
I thought the author got the sister
relationship across extremely well as it was almost like she was describing the
relationship I have with my younger sister. (Since she’s had a baby though we
get on much better J).
Because I think I am more like Katie as a
character at the beginning of the story, I found Mia’s recklessness so
frustrating and I could feel myself tensing when she was just making snap
decisions to go places and not really seeming to worry about the consequences
or the money involved. I liked though that the reader was able to see what
exactly was going through Mia’s mind, something that sadly Katie did not learn
until too late.
I thought the journal idea was great as it
helped the reader and Katie get to know and understand Mia better. Without the
journal I think Mia’s character would have stayed aloof, so this was brilliant
idea from Lucy Clarke.
When I read the Q&A at the back of the
book I discovered that the author really had been the places described in the
book, and I could see how well this had come across in her writing. She had
made the places really come alive for me. I thought the author really got the
feeling for the hot countries across and I could even feel the warmth of the places
portrayed in her writing and really felt like I was there.
I genuinely enjoyed reading this. I kept
wanting to know where the novel would take me next and at times wondered where
the author was going to go from there.
This was a great debut novel from Lucy
Clarke and I am really looking forward to more from her.
8/10
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