Monday, September 7, 2015

As Close as Sisters

As Close as Sisters
Colleen Faulkner

As Close As Sisters

Genre: Women's Fiction

Summary (from Goodreads): Since the age of 12, McKenzie Arnold has spent every summer at Albany Beach, Delaware, with her best friends Aurora, Janine and Lilly. The seaside house teems with thirty years of memories - some wonderful, others painful - and secrets never divulged beyond its walls. This summer may be the last they spend together, as Janine contemplates selling her family cottage. For now, all four enjoy morning beach walks and lazy evenings on the porch, celebrating Lilly's longed-for pregnancy and offering support during McKenzie's greatest crisis. It's time for laughter and recriminations, a time to forge a new understanding of a long-ago night when Aurora sealed their bond with one devastating act. And as the days gradually shorten, events will unfold in ways that none of them could have predicted, to make this the most momentous summer of all.
 
Review:  I'm a sucker for stories about lifelong friends dealing with huge life challenges together, and I enjoyed this book very much.  I've never read a book by Faulkner before, and I think I'll add her to my list of authors to read more of.  She has a gift for making the characters seem real, and I found myself crying as I imagined myself in the situations with the characters.  I like that in an author.

I would have given this book 4.5 or even 5 stars, except for a few flaws.  Firstly - and this is a minor complaint, I know, but it bothered me - the cover depicts three women sitting at the edge of a lake, when it really should have shown four women sitting on the edge of an ocean.  Would that have been so hard to do?  Secondly, three of the four women experienced events in this book that I found unbelievable.  While I expected one or two plot twists, three seemed a bit excessive for a novel like this.  And I truly think the ending would have been more powerful if it had been more in line with the reader's expectations.

Rating: 4 stars

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