The Good Sister by Sally Hepworth

Brief Summary: Rose and Fern are twins. Rose has always been Fern’s protector because she lives with intellectual disability and because their mother was an unstable addict. Like many sisters; they have a complex relationship. When Rose can’t conceive a baby; Fern sets out to have one to give her sister. When the stakes get high; the secrets of the past threaten to expose themselves. This is my fourth book by Sally Hepworth and having greatly enjoyed The Mother-In-Law and the Things We Keep, I was eager to read her latest.

Highlights: I absolutely loved Fern! She was laugh out loud funny at times. I thought Hepworth really nailed the thoughts and behaviors of someone with an intellectual disability. It was great to see a main character with an intellectual disability leading a high functioning life; working and pursuing a relationship.

Explanation of Rating: 4/5; Unfortunately, I read this novel during a really stressful time and it was hard to get sucked into until the very end. Please take this with a grain of salt; under other circumstances I may have finished this in two days. It is an easy to read domestic suspense novel.

Favorite Quotes: The library, Janet use to say is one of only a few places in the world that one doesn’t need to believe anything or buy anything to come inside….and it is the librarian’s job to look after all those who do.

She(Fern) had a gift for accepting life the way it was rather than questioning it. Some days-heck, every day-I envy her that.

Thank you to Net Galley and St. Martin’s Press for an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review

Note to Publisher: I’m sorry this review is late. I was recently hospitalized for a GI Bleed.

The Good Sister by Sally Hepworth is classic Hepworth, as it is book with a contemporary feel that turns into a thriller. The alternating perspectives and interesting plot lines make it a quick and enjoyable read. This is a thriller that I highly recommend.

The story is told from dual points of view. Twin sisters, Fern and Rose, present two sides of the story through the use of flashbacks to their childhood with a mix of present day. It is easy to understand their tight knit relationship and how things start to unravel.

❀ MANY INTERESTING CHARACTERS

There are many Interesting characters in the novel. Fern is an intriguing and lovable character who is easy to root for. She is an extremely intelligent librarian who has Asperger’s syndrome. As well there is Rose, an overprotective sister who is at times manipulative. It is fascinating to watch as the two sisters struggle with Fern’s increasing independence. Also, “Wally (aka Rocco),” Fern’s boyfriend is a vagabond of sorts who lives in a camper van and looks like Where’s Waldo, adds an element of humour to the narrative.

❀ FERN AND WALLY ARE A SWEET COUPLE

The relationship between Fern and “Wally” is really sweet. Wally is very supportive and helps Fern come up with ways to overcome some of her sensory issues. Not all of his ideas are winners, but it is so endearing to read about.

❀ A WILD RIDE

Early on in the book it is revealed that during their childhood, Fern did something really awful. As things start to unravel, the details become clear and the novel switches gears from family drama to thriller. It is quite a wild ride.

❀ MIND-WARPING

Fans of the author will enjoy this mind-warping thriller. The Good Sister by Sally Hepworth is a perfect book for a spring TBR. There is a little bit of everything in this story and the characters are fascinating.

What an interesting mystery/thriller! Sally Hepworth knows how to write these kinds of stories. This book was perfectly paced and I flew through this in a day. I will say that the plot twist is a fairly standard one for thrillers, but I was so engaged in the story that I didn’t mind.

I also enjoyed the autism rep in this since both “Wally” and Fern are autistic and their symptoms are very different, yet these characters compliment one another so well.

CW: grooming, pedophilia, sexual assault, murder

**Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for providing an e-arc in exchange for an honest review**

Excellent book! I should have known this would be good by the author. I just listened to The Mother-In-Law, and that book was enthralling and suspenseful as well.
Fern and Rose are twins. Fern is not neurotypical, whereas Rose is. As we read Rose's diary we understand that Rose has always protected her sister from their violent mother. As we see the present through Fern's eyes, we get to see her world view. I really enjoyed Fern's character (who, in my mind, had the voice of Chummy, from Call the Midwife!). The ending is maybe a bit too well tied up, but I thought the storyline was well done and kept me interested the whole time.

The Good Sister had me guessing all the way until the end. The author did a great job gifting more and more information before revealing the reason for the title. While some things seemed a little too convenient, I really enjoyed the story!

Sally Hepworth is one of my favorite authors. I was so excited to read her newest book, and I am so glad to say I loved this one! This domestic thriller was so good. This book is told in dual POVs between fraternal twin sisters. I loved seeing how different these sisters were.

I felt like this story was quite predictable, I knew what all the twists and turns were, but I still enjoyed it. I felt like the twists and turns really helped shape the story, and pulled it all together. I listened to it on audio, and I felt like it made the book even better. If you’re a fan of thrillers, I recommend checking this book out!

This book was phenomenal! I am a long-time fan of Hepworth, and her thrillers are top-notch. I can't wait to read this with a book club. I anticipate lots of lively discussion.

The Good Sister by Sally Hepworth is a dual-perspective story told from the present day view of Fern and the diary pages of her twin, Rose. Fern has an undiagnosed sensory processing disorder, Rose has viewed herself as her caretaker since day one, guiding her to keep her safe. Fern believes she can finally pay Rose back for all she has given up for her, only as she reveals her gift she discovers that maybe Rose hasn't really been guiding her at all.

A twisted, methodical thriller that knocked my socks off without terrifying me completely. Rose and Fern are as twin sister as they come, continuing to live in the same town they grew up in and spending every free moment together. Fern doesn't have the ability to process that this is strange, not until a kind stranger enters her life and opens her eyes to the world she now wants to experience. Only, she has a plan to help her sister and her sister...she has a plan too. This one was messed up, the kind of messed up that I honestly would expect to see on TV, because it is that believable. Sally Hepworth takes us through the twins youth and daily adult lives, there's nothing really sinister going on, at least there isn't at the surface. As the cracks begin to show, The Good Sister turns into a thriller that makes you question just how good of a sister one of the twins really is.

I am a bit down about the fact that The Good Sister just wasn't as big of a win for me as it was for others. I guessed far too early on what was occurring and while I remained engaged, guessing it really took away the excitement of the read, dropping it to 4 stats for me. The story flows at a great pace, there's just enough information given to keep you hanging on, and I love that it wasn't a super amped up high energy thriller, this one felt plausible. I just needed a few more things kept in the dark.

I think The Good Sister is a fantastic read that thriller fans should absolutely pick up. It's not crazy fast paced, but even more so, it's not obscenely impossible. This could happen. This probably has happened! It's that kind of read, the kind that makes you think about it all.

This was a phenomenal thriller about family secrets and so much more.

Highly recommend this one !!

I received a copy of this from NetGalley in exchange for fair and honest review.

Fern and Rose are fraternal twins that are different as night and day. Fern has sensory issues, meaning that you can't process bright lights, loud sounds, groups of people, etc. 

Rose, on the other hand, has been taking care of Fern since a very early age. In Rose's opinion, their mother was not good to them, and this caused things to happen in their lives that shaped them into the people they are today.

Because Rose has always taken care of Fern, Fern wants to give her sister what she wants: a baby. And that's where the trouble begins.

I really wanted to like this book, but at times it's like the novel couldn't decide if it was a thriller or just general fiction. There were certain aspects that wanted me to keep reading, but then some of the book was slower, prompting me to sludge along as a slow pace.

The ending was sort of satisfying, but not in a way that I think will be memorable. 

Was it readable? Yes. Was it "shout from the rooftops good"? Nope.

Moving along...

After reading The Mother in Law I knew I needed to read everything Sally Hepworth has/ever will write. While The Good Sister is not the typical thriller, I was glued to my Kindle trying to figure out what was going to happen next. Some of the twists were easy to see coming, I was drawn in by Fern and Wally and had to know how their story would end.

Rose and Fern are twins with a secret. Told in alternating POVs between Rose's diary and Fern's present day struggles you slowly piece together their childhood. I went into this one fairly blind and I believe that is what made it so good. I highly recommend this one to anyone that likes thrillers or is just trying to read a book that will suck you in from the first page.

The beauty of Net Galley is finding wonderful new authors and Sally Hepworth is a phenomenal author. This is my 2nd book I have read by her and it was truly captivating from the start. This is a tale of twin sisters, very different, one with a dark secret , both protective of one another no matter the consequences. It kept me riveted from page one to the end. I ignored the world while I happily was involved in this great suspenseful story. What a fun read !

This is a Net Galley read I highly recommend. Thank you to the publisher and to Net Galley for the opportunity.
My review opinion is my own.

Sally Hepworth does it again! She is now an auto-buy author for me. What made this book unforgettable were characters Fern and Wally. Fern will most likely go down as one of my faves of the year. I couldn’t put this book down and devoured it in 24 hours. Very entertaining, only qualm was that it was very predictable. Can’t wait to read more by this author.

"Most people think of me as Fern's protector. But the truth is, in her own funny way, she's always been mine."

I think it would be interesting to get the perspective of both women who have sisters, and women who don't that read this book. Sister dynamics are all over the place depending on the situation. People have an idea of what they think is normal. But every pair of sisters has their own normal which may or may not be like anything you've ever heard of.

For instance, sisters can be extremely close. Close to the point that no one else can ever touch. Or the undercurrents so completely volatile that the deep-running resentment never goes away. This story explores all of that. It also gives us enjoyable characters in, really, the wackiest situation.

I'm definitely interested to see what else Ms. Hepworth can come up with!

When the book title is The Good Sister - not The Good Sisters, the reader is alerted to look deeply as the story unfolds. If one sister is good, is the other sister bad or better than the other?
Rose and Fern are biological twins. In almost every way passable they are opposites. Fern is a tall, blonde librarian who is on the spectrum. Oh is she ever. Rose is a plump, diabetic interior designer. She has dark hair and is Fern's protector. Fern lives in a small apartment near Rose.
The twins shared a stressful upbringing. As Rose revealed in her diary, life with her single drug addicted mother was mentally and physically abusive. And there was also the horrible secret. Rose had to protect Fern.
As events occur and others enter their lives, we begin to question: What if the sisters are not as they seem?
Hints along the way may lead you to suspect what the reality is. You will be led to a satisfactory conclusion but yes there are improbable moments and unusual individuals thrown in.
I received and advance copy of this book from NetGalley. #NetGalley #TheGoodSister

The Good Sister is truly remarkable...in that it is remarkable for the ending to be simultaneously utterly predictable and absolutely come out of nowhere. At the same time! Truly an incredible achievement.

The twists and turns this plot takes are a bit off the rails, and usually feel like they’re twisty for the sake of twists, rather than following any actual internal logic or pushing the plot in a comprehensible direction. Without spoilers, the conclusion had me rolling my eyes. It’s predictable and formulaic, and yet still somehow inconsistent? Like I said, a remarkable feat.

The characterization of both sisters, even Fern despite her being the main narrative voice of the story, seems one-dimensional. I’m not the right person to assess the representation of autism here (Fern isn't diagnosed, partly for plot-related reasons, but is pretty clearly on the spectrum, with a sensory processing disorder and difficulty interpreting social cues, among other traits), and whether or not it feels accurate to some readers’ experience beyond the stereotyping a lot of it felt like to me, but the fact that I can’t tell you much about who she is as a person beyond being neurodivergent is telling. To a large degree, her character seems to begin and end with this fact. And her difficulty with social cues and nuanced language seems to show up mostly when the plot requires it, like misunderstanding that the question "Is it safe?" during a sexual encounter isn't talking about, like, are we safe from robbers breaking into the apartment and shooting us; this isn't a confusing social cue or figurative speech issue, it's using her lack of social awareness as an excuse to propel the plot along and have her not tell the guy she's intending to get pregnant from this encounter, which is...problematic, to say the least.

Rose's character development is also weak, though more for spoiler-y reasons so I won't get as much into that, but overall, though Fern gets much more page time and thus sympathy, I didn't really care enough about either sister to engage me.

And ultimately, I have to care about something in a story, whether its characters, plot, or writing - and I couldn't bring myself to get all that invested in any of the three elements.

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the advance review copy!

YOU GUYS. The Good Sister by Sally Hepworth was just amazing. I do feel as though it started just a little bit slow, and some of the "drops" in the beginning came out of nowhere, but I could not put it down once I hit the halfway mark. I stayed up way too late finishing it, and it was worth every minute. Well done, Ms. Hepworth!

The Good Sister is a keep you on your toes thriller.
Secrets and lies are the binding thread here.
We meet two sisters one has protected the other for their whole lives.
And when the one is unable to conceive the sister being protected figures she'll have a baby for her sister as a way to pay her back for a lifetime of care.
Things get a little twisted and strange and what you feel you know about the characters turns out to not be how things really are at all.
Kept me engrossed . I had to keep reading to the end to see if things would turn out the way I thought they would. They didn't!
Excellent!

Pub Date 13 Apr 2021
I was given a complimentary copy of this book. Thank you.
All opinions expressed are my own.

I don’t give out one star reviews easily. This is the first one I can remember giving in a long time, but there are many reasons why this book gets one star.

Disregarding the obvious flaws like the fact that the book's twist is ridiculously predictable (the obviously good sister isn’t good, shocking) and that the author tried to pull off a twist by having one of the characters directly lie to the reader during the whole book instead of writing scenes with enough nuance that they could be reinterpreted upon later readings, something that requires more skill than straight up deception, this book has horribly problematic messages.

The worst of these is that this book glamorizes rape-by-deception by making the protagonist target someone she thinks is homeless with the goal of getting him to impregnate her without his consent so that she can give the baby to her sister. Sounds super screwed up, right? Like a V. C. Andrews villain. Yet this is supposed to a GOOD character. The fact that she "wasn't thinking about getting pregnant" the moment before they have sex doesn't make the fact she planned to trick him into impregnating her okay. Nor does the fact that she doesn't understand, "Is it safe?" refers to birth control, presumably because of her autism, but more realistically because of plot-convenient stupidity that only shows up when the story needs to justify her doing something morally horrible, whether it’s rape-by-deception or drowning a boy. This character is supposed to be reasonably intelligent, but the plot routinely calls for her to lose all common sense for long periods of time. This is where the “terrible autism representation” comes in. Social ineptness is used as an excuse for not accurately communicating about safe sex practices, and then the character who is the victim in this situation is untroubled when this is revealed in a later scene.

What's worse is that when the victim realized this character was plotting to use him in order to get pregnant from the moment she met him, he immediately forgives her and deflects blame by putting it on the sister, despite the fact the character who committed the rape-by-deception came up with the plan on her own and even if it were true, you cannot force someone to commit rape by putting a suggestion in their head. The only way you can force someone to rape is by threats of violence, which didn’t occur. If this book were more nuanced, I would think maybe the story was trying to subtly show how Fern emotionally manipulated Rocco, but this book paints the rapist and the victim as living happily-ever-after after the rape-by-deception is disclosed, and the victim, upon hearing that they were targeted and taken advantage of, immediately forgives his rapist and wants to be with her. In short, the book minimizes the harmful effects of rape-by-deception.

Dating someone with the intention of becoming impregnated by them without their consent is not cute. Rape-by-deception is not a meet cute. It is a horrid sexual violation, and the way the book glosses over the trauma of these actions is one of the most upsetting things I've ever encountered in fiction.

Also during the scene where the rape-by-deception is disclosed, the victim states "I'm glad it happened" because he changed his mind about wanting a kid after the kid was born. This is 2021. No one should be supporting the idea of a baby trap, aka, the man who clearly states he doesn't want kids will magically change his mind the moment he's holding his child in his arms, even though he didn't know his partner wasn't on birth control because she misled him and he never consented to the increased risk of having a child while they were having sex. Also a victim saying "I'm glad it happened" after being told their partner had planned to use them to get pregnant without their consent is all kinds of messed up. This is essentially like the character saying "I'm glad I was raped" or "I'm glad I was taken advantage of" because they got a kid out of it. Imagine if the genders were reversed. There would be outrage.

Also I guess we're supposed to believe it wasn't rape because she "just wasn't thinking about birth control" at the moment right before they had sex. I could buy that if they only had sex once, but they have sex multiple times for at least several weeks and birth control never enters her mind? We're supposed to believe that a woman who has had a sexual relationship before and is supposed to be a reasonably intelligent woman won't think about birth control ONCE despite having sex multiple times within a short time span? And she knew all about how to get pregnant, so you can't tell me she didn't know the basics of how to avoid it.

Had the rape-by-deception been committed by a bad or even morally gray character, this could have been okay. As it is, Fern is painted as some kind of saint by the end of the book despite committing this horrific act (literally every bad thing she ever did was blamed on Rose at the end of the book, yet Rose never even suggested Fern go out and get pregnant, much less go out and commit rape-by-deception), and even when she apparently realizes what she did was wrong, her actions are excused by other characters making excuses for her. (Although Fern didn't seem to know or care at the beginning of the book that what she was doing was wrong, and nothing in book really seems to teach her she was wrong except possibly that as she fell in love with her victim, she saw him as a person instead of an object, but the mere fact she saw him as an object to begin with and then they end up happily-ever-after by the end is disgusting).

Apparently Rose is to blame for this too because she's to blame for everything. Apparently leaving a bottle of prenatal vitamins out was supposed to be manipulating Fern into plotting to get pregnant for her sister. But again, you can't force someone into committing rape-by-deception by leaving a bottle of pills out.

The story really should have had Fern accept responsibility for her actions and shown the harmful effects of rape-by-deception instead of showing the victim apparently thrilled with the outcome and not at all hurt by being taken advantage of. And excusing rape-by-deception by blaming a third party. That whole scene made my stomach turn because it's written in a way that makes it feel like we are supposed to be rooting for this pairing despite what occurred. It's truly upsetting how the rapist is absolved of all wrongdoing and how the harmful effects of rape-by deception are minimized in this story.

I've read books like YOU that cover toxic relationships and attempt to make you gain sympathy for villainous protagonists. Yet that book recognizes the actions in that book as harmful and crossing a line and even if you sympathize with the character, the harmful actions are not minimized. You see the effects on the victims and how harmful those effects are. This book isn't written in that way. It really seems like the story is supposed to be straightforward in that we are supposed to see Fern and Rocco as a healthy relationship, and Fern as a good person. This is why it’s a major problem.

A few more things. It’s said in the book that the character who murders and manipulates people “has narcissistic personality, or maybe even borderline.” Not only does this paint borderline personality disorder as being worse than narcissistic personality disorder by the way this is worded, it shows a clearly lazy approach to researching psychiatric diagnoses. If you’re not going to research personality disorders in depth, then don’t throw labels out there. Borderline personality disorder in particular gets a terrible rap in fiction and it is unfortunate to see yet another portrayal of BPD = evil, unredeemable character. It also doesn’t even describe the character at all. (She definitely fits more into NPD than BPD).

Rose has diabetes type 1 yet she “has to be really careful about what she eats”. Maybe if this story took place many years ago, but advancements in insulin technology have made it so that people with diabetes type 1 can eat pretty much anything in moderation as long as they carefully adjust their insulin levels to match the consumption. Yet another area where there was not enough research on a medical condition.

Just to sum up the main reasons for the one star:

Minimizes the harmful effects of rape-by-deception & portrays a rapist favorably

Poor representation for autism (otherwise intelligent character conveniently lacks common sense when plot demands and social ineptness is used as an excuse for miscommunicating about safe sex and for other harmful sexual practices)

Harmful representation of borderline personality disorder

Inaccurate diabetes type 1 information

Predictable plot

Poorly executed twist

I see this book everywhere and it is getting amazing reviews. However I suffered through only half of the book before giving up. I didn't like the characters or their interactions. The story was lacking any appeal. There are just too many good books to spend time finishing this one.