This book was really, really….odd.

THERE ARE SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW******

The synopsis says one lie becomes a defining moment. While one lie might have started the whole ball rolling, it takes several to unravel it. Very strange.

Let’s talk about the characters. I couldn’t find one character that I could really get behind. But then again, there’s so many lies and twists and turns that I’m not sure we’re really allowed to get to know them. And none of them are likable which was disturbing to me. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book where I completely disliked every single character in it. Even Maddy’s parents aren’t all that great and we don’t really get too much of them.

If there is any character development, it’s that they all wound up as even uglier versions of themselves than when the story started.

The story is also predictable. I knew right away Maddy was being gaslighted. But even if she wasn’t, there was no one in her life who wanted to help her. Everyone immediately took sides and there really was no explanation as to why. That was confusing to me.

The ending was also confusing. The story ramps up, comes to a climax and then…that’s it! Maddy drives away and it’s all over. It’s almost like the writer just petered out, stopped writing and turned in an incomplete assignment.

Overall, I can’t recommend this book at all.

One event becomes the defining moment in the lives of 3 of the main characters of this story. We meet Maddy, who is married to Joseph. Emily, is Maddy's half sister who has been gone for 20 years. Suddenly, Emily reappears and this begins to wreck havoc on Maddy's life. Not only must Maddy deal with the reappearance of her half sister, but she also seems be having some other issues, including memory loss and change in temperament. Could these symptoms be linked to that of her mother who suffered from early Alzheimer's Disease? This book takes us through the journey of when Emily was thrust into the family with her step mother and Maddy at 17 years of age when her mother died, and what transpired to make her leave the family suddenly and not be seen or heard from for over 20 years. This book is written from 3 points of view which gives us wonderful insight into each of the characters. I couldn't put this book down and was shocked at the ending.
I will be looking to read other books by this author. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the advance review copy in exchange for my honest review.

A lean, tight, suspenseful ride, "Half Sisters" by Virginia Franken starts quickly and just keeps moving throughout. Bold structural choices by the author create a tight line of escalation and surprises that continue to the last page. A fast, suspenseful page-turner that leaves the reader full of energy and ideas even after it has ended. Its daring ending will invite discussion and questions for hours to come, either for a book club or for a solo reader.

The likability of the characters suffered, so it was hard for me to like the book. There was an inherent negative tone to this book, which strangely haunted me and left a bitter aftertaste. It could have ended in a positive note, but the author chooses to let the sisters harp in hatred and jealousy, which became exhausting after awhile..

Thank you Netgalley for providing a free ARC for an honest review.

Maddy thinks she's happy. She married her childhood sweetheart, Joshua (who is immediately distrustful), teaches ballet, and lives in her childhood home close to her best friend/sister-in-law. But Maddy can't get pregnant, her husband's music gigs have dried up, and they can't sell her late parents' house without her estranged half sister's involvement. But then Maddy's husband finds Emily. Emily moves close by to flip a house and is the same unlikeable person she was when she entered Maddy's life in their teenage years. And Maddy's POV shows her to be overly reliant on a fairy tale husband who seems manipulative and secretive. In the end, none of the characters are very likeable and there isn't really anyone to root for. For fans of scandalous, psychological thrillers.

Half Sisters by Virigina Franken is a thrilling new book about two half-sisters who are reunited as adults following the abrupt end of their whirlwind relationship during childhood. Maddie hasn't seen her sister Emily since a mysterious accident and has since married her best friend's brother and Emily's ex-boyfriend, Joseph. But Maddie cannot trust her memory regarding her past or present leading to her - and our - distrust of those around her and the truth she thinks she knows.
This book was a really quick and excellent read that kept me enticed from beginning to end. Lies and deception throughout were kept interesting by the back and forth chronology from present-day to Maddie and Emily's childhood and multi-POV. One fault would be that Bee's POV chapters felt unnecessary and a little distracting to the sister's story. The characters other than Maddie and Emily could've used more background, especially given that most of them have been friends since childhood but I personally wasn't super bogged down by that. Overall, a really great thriller for those interested in getting into the genre as nothing is too outwardly creepy or scary.

Not a single likeable character. It's almost as if each couldn't see how horrible they were to each other and how much they were hellbent on destruction. There is no light, no forgiveness, no acceptance just pure revenge and hatred. And that it all hinged on a lie from a 14 year old. None of these people are good or deserve any sort of happiness, regardless of how wronged they think they were.

This was one of those books that you wondered if you read it before or something similar, hated tha characters in it and you didn’t know who was lying and who was telling the truth, didn’t find it great to be honest ..

This book was fast paced and an easy read. I didn’t feel like the characters had much development and none of them were likable so it was hard to choose a side. The ending was very abrupt and I didn’t feel fulfilled by the time I got to the last page. Overall, it took turns and kept me on my toes.

An enjoyable read that was well written with a good storyline and well developed, frustrating and at times really dislikable characters. I read this quickly and would definitely recommend reading,

I didn't love this book. I actually was ok with it till the end. I felt like the way that the book ended made the whole book incomplete. Characters were interesting, but I really didn't like any of them as people. There were some good plot twists, but nothing wrapped up at the end.

This book was very interesting. It had a lot of triggers in it if readers are sensitive to certain material in a book. This was a type of physiological thriller book. If you like that type of book, then this a great book for you. If you do not like that sort of book this is not the book for you. It definitely took the reader on a lot of twists and turns and the book had some good plot twists.

Woooahh! Hooked from start to finish as I scarfed this book down in an afternoon. A novel that questions the bonds of blood and water with Maddy and Emily, half-sisters who meet under unfortunate circumstances.

Perspectives matter here and love, lies, loyalty, jealousy and vengeance dominate. “Because where was the joy in taking something away from someone you’d hated all your life if you couldn’t let them know that it was you who had done it?”
All vulnerable and human in their own way and a lesson to self in withholding judgment as I felt myself swinging on the pendulum of blame as my empathy quickly swapped to disgust and back again.

A timely themed novel with historical deeds being dug up on all kinds of souls in the media. You really can’t escape history.

“Unless everyone buys into exactly the same story, a true thing sometimes isn’t a true thing at all.” It was hard to wrap my head around the deceit. Spooky really.

Even though it was impossible to agree with many of the actions of the characters, the author shared their plights in such a way that you almost understood. We all live somewhere in the grey, really.

A couple things didn’t resonate:
- Greg talked about the distinction between truth and honesty and said he would not lie if asked about the incident. Surely Joseph would/could have asked his best friend about what had happened at the time?
- Bee, a stalwart supporter of Maddy throughout, but yet she was so quickly able to drop her loyalty.

Everyone received their comeuppance and it was a rollercoaster of a read. Many thanks to #netgalley for a copy of this in exchange for my views.

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley.

Five out of seven stars - Maddy and Emily are half sisters who never meet until they are teenagers. Emily loses her mother at age 17 and is forced to move in with her biological father’s family in the smothering San Fernando Valley suburb of Myrtlebury. Maddy, age 14, is initially intrigued by her new sister before quickly becoming put off by the older girl’s tough demeanor, a response to her troubled past. Emily quickly falls enters into a romantic entanglement with Joseph, a neighborhood boy who shares her disillusionment.

Twenty years later, Maddy and Joseph are now married to one another. Still in Myrtlebury, they have moved into Maddy’s childhood home after the loss of both of her parents. Maddy’s life remains small and insular, counting Joseph’s sister Bee as her best friend and frequently interacting with other figures from her childhood. With both women inheriting an equal stake in the house, Maddy needs to track down Emily, who she has been estranged from for many years.

As her half sister reenters her life, Maddy finds herself declining as her life crumbles around her. Although only 33, she has become forgetful in a way that is ominously reminiscent of her late mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s Disease. She and Joseph struggle with infertility and financial woes, and her relationships with friends begin to suffer. As her life grows progressively more chaotic, Maddy is forced to consider whether her half sister’s presence is to blame.

While the book lags in the middle with some muddier plot points (for example, the ordeal with Maddy’s dance studio being sold took way too long), it was an overall enjoyable read.

The novel does a great job of creating two intriguing and opposite perspectives from sympathetic characters. In the present day, siding with Maddy feels natural. She has a seemingly normal, average life in the suburbs with commonplace goals- to start a family and to find financial stability. As she grows more suspicious of her half sister’s motives, Emily takes shape as more of a villain who is desperate to ruin Maddy’s marriage to her one-time boyfriend. Likewise, Maddy becomes a somewhat unreliable narrator as it becomes more evident that something is happening to her mentally to account for all of her mental slip-ups and forgetfulness.

At the same time, the book slowly unravels the story of the past and what took Emily far away from her sister for so many years. As more is revealed, Emily sheds her villain persona and becomes the sympathetic figure, one I found myself rooting for in spite of her less-than-orthodox methodologies.

Emily and Maddy’s character development is decent, but I was still left with a very weak perception of Joseph. For a man who is the central lynchpin to twenty years of drama between two sisters, a more fleshed out character is well-warranted. His characterization is particularly weak in the present day. I needed more convincing that he was the kind of man that both women would still badly want to be with.

The book switches between three points of view: Maddy and Bee in the present day and Emily in the past. The majority of the chapters, however, are from Maddy’s point of view. The limited number of Emily-focused chapters makes sense as the backstory takes shape, but Bee’s two or three chapters did not feel necessary. The novel would have been stronger if Bee’s perspective was completely eliminated and a different strategy was used for the same exposition.

More than anything else, Half Sisters offers the following wisdom: move far away from your hometown and the people you went to high school with, and never look back.

20 years ago, Maddy and her half sister Emily lived together. Emily was troubled and wild and caused upheaval in the fairly quiet family home. Before long, Emily is sent to juvenile detention and Maddy is able to grow up in peace.

At the start of the novel Emily, is back in town, rediscovered by Maddy's husband who incidentally was her first boyfriend. Maddy hopes this means that she can settle her father's affairs and move on with her life. She needs Emily to sign off on documents and the house sale.

Emily seems different...something is going on. And Maddy has problems at home. Her husband is acting suspicious and she keeps losing things. Silly items, important items...much like her mother did before she developed dementia. What is happening now that Emily is back?

I loved this book! It really drew me in. I am only giving it 4 starts because the ending is just too abrupt - the ending is just as important as the whole story when it's good! If you like revenge stories, battling siblings, secretive families then book is for you!
.#NetGalley #LakeUnionPublishing #HalfSisters

Seasoned readers of crime and thriller novels quite certainly will be able to predict the story line of "Half Sisters" by Virginia Franken, however, it doesn't mean there's no space for enjoyment or pleasure of following the story as it unfolds.

Sisters relationships, especially the unhealthy ones, are often explored in the literature, starting as soon as in ancient Greece. It's safe to say that this bond is quite special. In the novel by Virginia Franken the readers encounter even more complicated relationship-between half sisters who came in each other lives under quite extraordinary circumstances. We get to revisit their past and presence from the perspectives of both of them, as well as a friend of Maddie, Bee.

What Franken did very well, was creating an array of truly unlikable characters, who are complex, and therefore very human. Even though it is hard to identify with any of the protagonists, the story around them is engaging and well-constructed.

I quite enjoyed this book. It centres on two sisters and is told from both their points of view. Emily and Maddie have never been close and when Emily comes back into Maddie’s life, the story unfolds and we learn what happened when they were teenagers and the consequences that now has for their relationship in the present day.

Without giving anything away, it is obvious what direction the main storyline is heading in. However there are still some twists and turns that you don’t see coming.

You become suspicious of all characters but I was still invested in Maddie. It had a good pace and I wanted to keep reading. I’m not sure how I felt about the ending, was it abrupt? Initially I thought so but then actually, I wasn’t fussed to know what happened to all the characters. In the main, everything was revealed and I liked even in the last scene, we were reminded of the hatred between the sisters.

This review has been posted on goodreads and my Instagram page - DippyBooks

Maddie seems to have the perfect life, a beautiful home, a loving husband Joseph and her best friend Bee who adores hers. Or so it seems. When Maddie's sister Emily moves back into town after more than 20 years away, Maddie's life becomes a whole lot less idyllic and much more complicated. To make matters worse Emily is Joseph's first true love and Maddie is becoming increasingly confused and seems to be losing her grip on reality. Try as she might she cannot let of of the past and let's her suspicions of an affair loom over her marriage. Are her husband and her half sister really having an affair or is Maddie truly losing it? Absolutely loved this book! It definitely has you continuously guessing and second guessing yourself. The writer puts the reader on an epic crazy journey.

First off let me start by saying I did enjoy the feel of the background in the setting of the story. It instantly made me feel I was part of the friendship between Bee and Mattie. These 2 women are the center of the story for a while. Once I got going into the book, I kinda figured out what was happening and most likely how it ended, I enjoyed getting to the ins and outs and especially the why. A lot of the middle I kinda wanted to skip over as it did not mean a lot to me. Overall, I kept coming back to the book to find out what happened that ultimately caused the reason for how it ended.

Here’s the whole story on Half Sisters, a riveting psychological thriller by Virginia Frankenstein: I could not put this book down. My pulse quickened page after compelling page as I fell for--and into--this tale of two very different jealous sisters, one dark heck-of-a-secret, and the ultimate unimaginable revenge. Five stars—a sun and a moon.