An electrifying novel about the unyielding bond between two sisters, which is severely tested when one of them is accused of the worst imaginable crime.
Martha and Becky Blackwater are more than sisters–they’re each other’s lifelines. When Martha finds herself struggling to balance early motherhood and her growing business, Becky steps in to babysit her niece, Layla, without a second thought, bringing the two women closer than ever. But when Layla is found dead one morning, at only eight weeks old, Becky is charged with the unthinkable: the murder of her sister’s child.
Nine months later, Becky is on trial and maintains her innocence–and so does Martha. Unable to shake the feeling that her sister couldn’t possibly be guilty, Martha sets out to uncover exactly what happened that night, and how things could have gone so wrong. As the trial progresses, fault lines between the sisters begin to show–revealing cracks deep in their relationship and threatening the family each has worked so hard to build. With incredible empathy and resounding emotional heft, The Good Sister is a powerhouse of a novel that will lead readers to question everything they know about motherhood, family, and the price of forgiveness.
This is one of the ones I just picked up the library since it was free to read and I had the time. The premise was super interesting and engaging, and reading back, it still was. Unfortunately, this book didn’t execute in the way I thought it would. I still made it through, and I wouldn’t call it terrible, but I certainly call it good—at least for my standards. Read on to maybe see if I was being too harsh.
The Good Sister is a courtroom mystery thriller that revolves around a tragic family incident, the death of Martha’s child, Layla. Worst of all, Martha’s sister, Becky, is on trial for the murder, and the odds are not looking good. Once each other’s closest lifelines, inevitably the family is literally and emotionally split apart as the trial threatens to reveal all the deep secrets of the family’s past, and air out every time detail of one’s personal life for all to see. Needless to say there cannot be a winner in this court game.
Now that all sounds nice and dandy, but I really had some major issues with it. First, I wasn’t really expecting this novel to be a full on courtroom drama, which was made even more unsettling when there was a lot of bitter criticism of the legal process embedded in the book too. While the commentary was correct in the sense that law does tend to be cold and strip things down to their details to be used as evidence in court, I think it’s fair to say that a case couldn’t possibly be solved without any order either. I think I would’ve liked to see a bit more focus on how the legal process negatively affected the family relationships, rather than just a criticism of the law for doing so. In that way the perspective felt strange, since the focus seemed to be more on the legal system rather than the actual relationship breakdown. Or at least that’s how I felt.
My second issue was that there wasn’t much suspense. The only real main question was whether the sister actually did it or not. Everything else just seemed meaningless in comparison, and felt like it was thrown in there for the extra drama and had no real relevance either way. Because only one thing really mattered, it felt like the story dragged on, and I did have a bit of a tougher time getting through the book. Maybe someone who finds the rest of the plot more interesting wouldn’t mind as much. But I’ve definitely read more exciting courtroom thrillers before.
I think I was still ready to forgive it all if there was a good finale to make up for it all. Unfortunately it was the opposite. I could see the ending coming from a mile away, and I am not really one who actively tries to ruin the book for myself too much either. But the way the book was written made it really obvious what was going to happen by avoiding the possibility until the end. The way I saw it, the ending was always a possibility, and the way it makes its way into the story was just too obvious. And while the ending was plausible enough, the denouement and resolution was simply not satisfying enough to justify me reading through this book. I was truly pretty disappointed, as the premise really is quite good.
I think the characters were decent, and a better plot could really have saved this novel. Unfortunately these things were not to be found. The writing in and of itself wasn’t particularly bad or anything, just the story itself wasn’t very compelling, unfortunately, for me. I would look elsewhere for a thriller or courtroom drama.
Down the Rabbit Hole 