A review by ed_moore
The Sisterhood by Katherine Bradley

dark tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

1.25

‘The Sisterhood’ was made out to be the feminist retelling of 1984, and whilst the element of the rebel group ‘The Sisterhood’ was a nice introduction, a real resistance as oppose to the manufactured brotherhood in Orwell’s source material, that was the only part that lived up. I never expected ‘The Sisterhood’ to match ‘1984’ as Orwell’s masterpiece is my unparalleled favourite book and I can’t foresee much ever matching it, but I didn’t expect it to disappoint quite so much. Bradley set out to recognise some of the flaws in 1984, such as the controversiality of Winston and lack of Julia’ s depth of the character, but in doing so made Julia arguably more dislikable than Winston, made every effort to limit Winston’s role in the story and appear solely in a negative light, and in creating Julia’s identity tore apart the message of the original dystopian, that inevitable threat of totalitarianism and the sufferings of the proletariat, Winston and Julia being among the everyman beneath the oppression of the totalitarian force. Bradley had her own vision of Julia which was the point of her retelling, but I felt this vision undermined Orwell and his purpose, as to bring it to light she had to tell her own story, the aspects of the original plot of ‘1984’ only appearing in as small a section as possible just so the story made sense in the original dystopian context, and as a justification for Bradley to use Orwell’s world building and characters. Not to mention some elements to the original text make no sense as the scenes are so limited that included references such as the rhyme ’The bells of saint Clements’ that is such a powerful collection of lyric in ‘1984’ are inserted in in their moment most powerful with no background or prior explanation in ‘The Sisterhood’, making their impact worthless. Moving away from my criticisms relating to the plot and source material, Bradley’s writing was also juvenile, it didn’t tear you apart in the areas where Orwell set the plot up to be most impactful, and her writing, descriptions and most characters were flat. I pity anyone who read this before reading ‘1984’ for some reason, as it has massacred such an important story and torn all meaning out of it. I recognise my review of this was scathing and Bradley was trying something different, though I really don’t think it worked and maybe someone who regards ‘1984’ so highly is not the person to trust to give an unbiased opinion on this book. I would however be interested to read the other 1984 retelling that came out recently ‘Julia’, for the sake of comparison.