by Barbara O’Neal

Great story idea!…but…

Verdict: Interesting enough to finish it. Mildly recommend as long as you don’t mind a little bit of sappiness and drifting around in a story that should do better to keep to it’s central theme.

What’s it about? Kit, an ER doctor in California, sees her sister Josie on the TV news from Auckland, New Zealand, where a club has caught fire. So? Her sister has been dead for fifteen years! (Great set-up to hook the reader.) Kit, emotionally torn from the sense of grief, loss, and anger, decides she must go to New Zealand and find/confront her sister. After arriving in New Zealand, Kit begins to live out her past (through flashbacks): days on the beach with her sister, surfing, a lost teenage boy unofficially adopted by the family, a father and mother with such a turbulent marriage that they ignore their children, and a “trauma that has haunted Kit and Josie their entire lives.” You also get to experience the same backstory from Josie as she lives a new life as Mari, fifteen years after she was supposedly killed in a terrorist bombing in Europe. Plenty to work with there.

The story is written in first person and in the present tense, e..g., “I eat my sandwich at the table…” vs. “I ate my sandwich at the table….” Each chapter rotates between Kit and Josie (whose name is now Mari in New Zealand) as the story weaves together their tumultuous past and fairly benign present. At first, it’s a bit easy to get confused, yet after a few switches and flashbacks, it flows well. The author likely chose the present tense due to the numerous flashbacks in the book (where she moves into past tense to subtly help the reader). It is also written with much flowery prose with a huge dose of adverb-induced descriptions of foods, atmosphere, ocean, weather, shops, Javier’s this and that…more on him soon. That will either play into the reader’s immersion or push away others…kind of a personal choice, i.e., either lovely, romantic, beautiful…or sappy maybe even cheesy at times, depending on your taste. Most of the time I enjoyed the style.

What’s good about the book? The flashbacks are better than the present-day story, IMO. The descriptions of their childhood including the interaction with their parents, their unique attraction/love of their adopted older brother, and some of the tragic and traumatic incidents they faced were all well done–more interesting than the present-day story to find Josie/Marie. In the flashbacks, the sisters come alive with realistic emotions and react as you might expect. For instance, it’s easy to believe Kit (in her present state) to be a loner who either works or surfs (alone). The backstory reveals abandonment and a form of abuse by her parents that support this. Josie’s abandonment by her parents pushes her toward a much different path, one of drug addiction and sexual promiscuity. Her current world is much more mainstream-maybe overcompensation for her past.

Without spoiling too much, the story shows how two sisters can overcome the difficulties of a dysfunctional family and environment…and survive or even grow later in their lives. In the end, it does include a healthy dose of forgiveness and redemption, leaving us with the satisfying ending most readers desire.

What was not so good? The story idea starts off with a bang. Once Kit gets to New Zealand, rather than marching forward to find her sister, she gets caught in a love affair with Javier, a rather cardboard character who says little but touches Kit in variously well-described ways. The relationship seems a sideshow (one of those curves on Lombard Street) to the overall novel and gets in the way in the first third of the book. Maybe it’s someone for Kit to interact with during the scenes where she would have been alone. Javier is a singer/guitarist star of some sort who only seems to have to perform if he wants to and is hanging around New Zealand for no apparent purpose other than to show up in scenes in this book.

Another distraction is an old house on an overlook that Mari’s husband (another uninteresting character) buys for her as a surprise. The house carries a secret related to a death/murder that happened long ago, one we are told about later in the story. There is also a great deal of time spent describing this house. The whole set-up has nothing to do with the main story. If it were left out, the main story would carry on without impact.

Where the backstory is good, the sisters and their life and decisions in the present is a little harder to buy. Kit, a loner and someone who trusts almost no one, suddenly decides to let a stranger (Javier) into her life as soon as she arrives in New Zealand. She should be out looking for her sister, who she hasn’t seen in 15 years. Maybe the author was showing some hesitancy to face her sister, but I didn’t read it that way. Either way, IMO, she should have really struggled to let her guard down, given her past and present life. Josie (Mari in the present), who has had a troubled past, lives a perfect life with a perfect family. Above I related that to overcompensating. Still…it’s really stretches the ends of the spectrum.

What was bad? Nothing.

Bottom line: The story was a quick read, had some notable weaknesses, but it was entertaining enough and immersed you in another place. You DO want to know what happens when the sisters finally meet. And the ending works.