Blood Sisters by Jane Corry
Published: 29th June 2017
Publisher: Penguin Viking
Pages: 464
Available on Kindle and in Paperback
Rating: 4/5
Blurb
Two women. Two versions of the truth.Kitty lives in a care home. She can't speak properly, and she has no memory of the accident that put her here. At least that's the story she's sticking to.
Art teacher Alison looks fine on the surface. But the surface is a lie. When a job in a prison comes up she decides to take it - this is her chance to finally make things right.
But someone is watching Kitty and Alison.
Someone who wants revenge for what happened that sunny morning in May.
And only another life will do...
Review
Jane Corry’s debut thriller My Husband’s Wife was one of my
favourite books of last year, it was a book full of twists, turns and intense
relationships. I found Blood Sisters a good follow up but I did enjoy My
Husband’s Wife more.
Blood Sisters is a book which is sure to catch your
attention with the tagline: Three little girls. One good. One bad. One Dead. It
is a book which had me curious from the start and as I read it was a book that
filled me with a sense of uneasy dread that made it hard to put down.
The story starts with Alison an art teacher working in an
adult community college teaching stained glass window making. She lives alone
and it’s soon very obvious she’s not a happy individual, mainly because she has
been using pieces of broken glass to cut herself. Alison seems to have no close
bonds with anyone and appears to be living a life of depravity almost. When she
takes the job in the prison it’s almost as if she believes she should be locked
up herself. I found her a very hard character to like but was intrigued as to
what had happened to her to make her so shut away from life.
We then meet Kitty who is mentally and physically disabled,
has suffered memory loss and is living in a care-home, she is unable to talk clearly
and all her carers can hear is incoherent babbling. Kitty communicates to her
carers with head movements which often get misinterpreted but what I found the
most interesting was that Corry has given the readers a chance to hear the
voice of Kitty and this is something which works very well. Kitty’s voice comes
from her internal thoughts and from these we learn that Kitty is quite a
character with a very sarcastic temperament. What Kitty wants to know most of
all is how she became like she is and as the story develops it clear that she
too is hiding things.
I think Jane Corry has been very clever with the way she
has written Kitty’s character, never before have I read a book where a mentally
ill person has been given their own voice. I found Kitty a fascinating
character and was surprised how much I like her. I do think certain events that
happened to her were a little unrealistic though.
Blood Sisters is a book about the relationship between
sisters and I think Corry has done a good job of exploring this dynamic and
what it really means. It was a novel which I found quite intense at times and
had a chilling feeling about the whole book, I wouldn’t recommend reading on
your own as certain parts made me jumpy. One thing which lessened the intensity
for me was everything seemed a little too coincidental and this took away from
the shock factor for me. I also found the very end was a little predictable but
was perhaps the best way to end Alison and Kitty’s story.
I enjoyed reading Jane Corry’s second novel, her ability to
right about complex relationships comes through in Blood Sisters and she has
not lost that ability to feel uneasy while reading something. I’m looking
forward to seeing what she writes next.
Thank you to Penguin Viking for sending me a copy to review
and for inviting me to be part of this blog tour.
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