Description from Amazon:
From
the vineyards of New Zealand to the majestic landscape of Ireland, The
Missing Sister is the penultimate instalment in the
multimillion-selling epic Seven Sisters from Lucinda Riley. A breathtaking
story of love and loss, inspired by the mythology of the famous star
constellation.
They’ll search the world to find her . . .
The six D’Aplièse sisters have each been on their own incredible journey to
discover their heritage, but they still have one question left unanswered: who
and where is the seventh sister?
They only have one clue – an image of a star-shaped emerald ring. The search to
find the missing sister will take them across the globe; from New Zealand to
Canada, England, France and Ireland, uniting them all in their mission to at
last complete their family.
In doing so, they will slowly unearth a story of love, strength and sacrifice
that began almost one hundred years ago, as other brave young women risked
everything to change the world around them . . .
It’s been quite a few years since I read the first six novels
in the series, but I remember they seemed very formulaic and I was hoping that
all would be solved with this “final” book which, as it turns out, is not the
final one and does not answer much but leaves yet more mysteries to be solved.
I’ll be honest… it was a slog getting through this. So incredibly long with so much unnecessary info in it. The bits that were interesting were the historical retelling of the trouble in Ireland and the stories behind the sides of the family that you get to see through the eyes of generations. The childhoods and turmoil the families went through and the political angle thrust on them made for intense reading.
It was so odd that these sisters all thought it was a great idea to find this missing sister and pursue her across the world even though she had told them to stay away and that she was scared, thinking she was being stalked. Why would she take any interest in attending a funeral for someone she didn’t know and that she (and technically the others) were not even related to? Imagine someone pitches up and says I’m somehow related to you and now you must come with me to honour someone you’ve never heard of? Especially when you know who your family is? I’d run a mile.
But what was tedious was the repetition of things like people
telling others how tired they looked, or someone saying they were perfectly
capable of doing something, or the same event that had happened repeated by the
other person from their POV. Or even the number of times food and drink were
brought into the story – we know Mary likes toast as breakfast so please don’t
tell us ten times! Or that Mary was called Merry so many times? And for
goodness’ sake – do we have to have a summation of each sister’s backstory
again?
Georg the lawyer could have solved all this early in the book yet chose to disappear “to find something out” and couldn’t be contacted. Really? With all this going on and the money being spent from the estate to track the sister down? Not to mention the “secret” Mary was hiding. Again, really? In this day and age, and considering she was on the other side of the world, why couldn’t she have done something about it or told her husband of thirty-five years? Thirty-five years and she couldn’t share something that “terrified her every day of her life”? Nope. The ending with Peter was not necessary. The whole meeting just took up space and could have been over and done with in one conversation. Ambrose and Father John, however, now that was a lovely part of the story.
I’m looking forward to having all the loose ends (and there are a lot) tied up as the premise behind the series is great but the execution has been so hard to get through. Pa Salt here we come…
