Summer with my sister. Book review.

Summer with my sister, by Lucy Diamond.

Polly has always been the high-flier of the family, with the glamorous city lifestyle to match. Clare is a single mum with two children, struggling to make ends meet in a ramshackle cottage. The two sisters are poles apart and barely on speaking terms. But then Polly's fortunes change unexpectedly and her world comes crashing down. Left penniless and with nowhere else to go, she's forced back to the village where she and Clare grew up, and the sisters find themselves living together for the first time in years. With an old flame reappearing for Polly, a blossoming new career for Clare and a long-buried family secret in the mix, sparks are sure to fly. Unless the two women have more in common than they first thought? (From the blurb)

I'm not sure if it's me, or the books. I've been reading quite a lot of "chick lit" books recently and I'm finding that they are all very same-y and predictable.

This book was another that was same-y and predictable, but it wasn't all bad.

I almost gave up on Summer with my sister just a few pages in because I really didn't like Polly, her world, the high flying job in the city, flash car, expensive apartment, just wasn't my cup of tea, I became very bored, very quickly.

I did keep going though because I knew the high flying job wasn't going to last for long.

I liked Clare, the other sister, as soon as she was introduced, and her character was far more relatable than Polly.

When Polly arrives back home, out of luck, out of money, and needing to move back in with her parents, the story finally gets going, but it just never quite takes off.

I really liked the sisterly relationship, it was well observed and was the strong point of the story, Karen and Graham , the parents, were also well written characters, I'd maybe have liked to see more of them.

What I really did like about Summer with my sister was that it wasn't written around a predictable romance, it was predominantly a story of two sisters finding their relationship again.

However, as I said, this genre seems to be churning out increasingly predictable books, you can pretty much map out the rest of the story a quarter way in.
I'm really hankering for something a little different, unfortunately this book was not something different.

It's possible that I'm being pernickerty now but something that particularly irked me about this book – which also irked me about the one I read prior to this one – was the blurb.
I wish that the blurb would do what it's supposed to do, give you a taste of the story, throw a line to hook you in, without selling something you're just not getting.

In this case, the long buried family secret, was really inconsequential, just a case of one sister thinking one thing, the other sister thinking something. Not so much a secret as people just not really ever mentioning something.

Generally I enjoy Lucy Diamonds books and this was a pleasant enough story, I read it in one day, and there are certainly worse ways to while away a day, but I can only give it a weak 3 out of 5 because of the predictability. It's one to borrow from the library rather than buy.

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