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gigishoewrites 's review for:
The Winter Sister
by Megan Collins
Overall 3.5/5 Stars
I was given an AR copy by NetGalley in return for an honest review.
Megan Collins writes about mother-daughter relationships in this mystery about returning to your roots. Her story tell about Sylvie whose older sister Persephone was murdered in their teenage years. Sylvie is returning to her home in order to care for her dying mother and begins to obsess about the unsolved case relating to her sister. Collin’s has beautiful passages about the complications of family and really make the reader identify with the various levels of dealing with having lost a loved one and the possibility of losing another.
I wanted to like this book more but I couldn’t get over the fact that there was so much exposition given to us. The thing that makes a thriller/suspense novel so enticing is not knowing a lot of information as the reader and slowly being exposed to it along with the protagonist. In the first three chapters of Collins’ book we see the protagonist as a teenager dealing with the beginning disappearance of her sister. We are given so much information that when it is all revealed later to other characters the reaction as a reader is meh because I’d spent the entire novel already knowing what they are now revealing about themselves!
Collins does do a good job of giving subtle hints to larger, serious, issues within the book. She writes about the mother-daughter relationship in a touching way that is relatable to anyone who has had disagreements. I love that she shows how a situation can have drastically different results based off of who is explaining what happened. The complications of family relationships is very well done, even among the sisters - “Sometimes, Persephone would say to me, it’s like you and I have two different mothers. But we didn’t. We had one mother, one woman who had birthed us both.”
Another thing that Collins’ does well is realize that her novel has lots of questions and disjointed problems and she explains them through her characters by the end of the novel. I had so many questions written down and comments about behaviors not making sense (mostly the mother’s lack of emotion toward her second daughter) and Collins’ did a great job allowing her characters to explain themselves.
I really did enjoy novel in the end but I feel this would have been a stronger story if we had been allowed to find out information along the way instead of bulked at the beginning – we knew Evan had left bruises on her, we knew she locked the window, etc..
I was given an AR copy by NetGalley in return for an honest review.
Megan Collins writes about mother-daughter relationships in this mystery about returning to your roots. Her story tell about Sylvie whose older sister Persephone was murdered in their teenage years. Sylvie is returning to her home in order to care for her dying mother and begins to obsess about the unsolved case relating to her sister. Collin’s has beautiful passages about the complications of family and really make the reader identify with the various levels of dealing with having lost a loved one and the possibility of losing another.
I wanted to like this book more but I couldn’t get over the fact that there was so much exposition given to us. The thing that makes a thriller/suspense novel so enticing is not knowing a lot of information as the reader and slowly being exposed to it along with the protagonist. In the first three chapters of Collins’ book we see the protagonist as a teenager dealing with the beginning disappearance of her sister. We are given so much information that when it is all revealed later to other characters the reaction as a reader is meh because I’d spent the entire novel already knowing what they are now revealing about themselves!
Collins does do a good job of giving subtle hints to larger, serious, issues within the book. She writes about the mother-daughter relationship in a touching way that is relatable to anyone who has had disagreements. I love that she shows how a situation can have drastically different results based off of who is explaining what happened. The complications of family relationships is very well done, even among the sisters - “Sometimes, Persephone would say to me, it’s like you and I have two different mothers. But we didn’t. We had one mother, one woman who had birthed us both.”
Another thing that Collins’ does well is realize that her novel has lots of questions and disjointed problems and she explains them through her characters by the end of the novel. I had so many questions written down and comments about behaviors not making sense (mostly the mother’s lack of emotion toward her second daughter) and Collins’ did a great job allowing her characters to explain themselves.
I really did enjoy novel in the end but I feel this would have been a stronger story if we had been allowed to find out information along the way instead of bulked at the beginning – we knew Evan had left bruises on her, we knew she locked the window, etc..