The Sea Sisters: Gripping - a twist filled thriller

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Essential reading if you have a sister, as Clarke has totally nailed the complexities of that relationship. It’s perfectly paced (tense right up to the end)... and you’ll want to quit your job and go travelling." - Heat

After their mother dies of cancer, Mia feels even more restless. She want to find her father and finally understand who she really is. So one day she just takes off with her best friend Finn to a long trip, little knowing that she won't return from this trip alive. Katie find it hard to accept her sister's death nor why she would end her life. When Katie finds her sister's travel diary, she decides to follow in her sister's footsteps. She hope to learn more about her sister's last months and perhaps find out what or who pushed Mia over the edge...Katie’s world is shattered by the news that her headstrong and bohemian younger sister, Mia, has been found dead at the bottom of a cliff in Bali. The authorities say that Mia jumped—that her death was a suicide. A beautifully written story about the bond between sisters and the secrets they keep to protect one another. Clarke creates two very realistic sisters, Katie and Mia, who are different in almost every single way. Katie, the older sister, is beautiful, ambitious and living a very straight-edged lifestyle. She has a loving fiance, a good job and knows exactly what she wants. Her younger sister Mia is aloof, spontaneous and feels as if she is living in her older sisters shadow. One day, she decides enough is enough and books an around the world trip with her childhood friend Finn. Unfortunately, one terrible night Mia is found dead at a notorious suicide spot in Bali. The local police consider it a cut and dry case... What lead Mia to do such a thing? At first I didn't like any of the characters and I was really hoping that it would change and that they would become more complex as the story unfolded. But as the story continued, and more characters entered the story, I just found that none of them appealed to me at all, and this made the story feel almost stagnant. I also grew a little tired of all the plot "twists" which, in my mind, were all lazy, easy options for trying to add drama into the story and ended up verging on the ridiculous as it emerged that eventually they'd all ended up sleeping with each other. There are some currents in the relationship between sisters that run so dark and so deep, it’s better for the people swimming on the surface never to know what’s beneath . . .

Katie's only clues lie buried within Mia's trusty journal, which she used to document her entire life. Katie decides to follow in Mia's footsteps, following the exact same route her sister did, to discover what lead her to jump from the cliff top. Whilst reading the journal, Katie discovers some devastating secrets, and questions - did she really know her sister at all?This may be set in sunny places like Bali and Maui but underneath lies the darker story of two sisters...deeply moving" - Star

I enjoyed this book from start to finish. It was very easy to read, meaning I didn't have to struggle to get to know the characters, which can be a challenge when reading a book of this genre. I empathised with both Katie and Mia, and there were just enough supporting characters to make this a very believable story. I liked the concept of sisterhood and the realism that the author brought to the complex relationship sisters often have. Its a unique connection. Con queste parole inizia il diario di viaggio di Mia, la cui morte a Bali, durante questo viaggio, viene annunciata dalla polizia inglese alla sorella maggiore Katie. The plot of this reminded me of Sister by Rosamund Lupton - the relationship between Katie and Mia is similar (sensible older sister, flighty younger sister who is something of a bohemian spirit) and the basic outline of the plot is the same (the younger sister is found dead and it's ruled to be suicide; the older sister doesn't believe this can be true and sets out to discover what really happened). In fact, I think the two books are likely to appeal to the same audience - which perhaps accounts for the UK title being changed to include the word 'sisters' - but The Sea Sisters does something more interesting with the premise.The beginning of the novel was okay but when it switched to Mia's "before" story, I hated the way it was written. I think it would have been better if Mia's POV had been given in the form of her diary entries. Mia was hard to like, so I started to skim her POVs. It was pretty obvious what had happened between her and Katie's boyfriend. Also that revelation about her father not being her real father but her uncle, and that her real father killed himself in his 20s ...bah!

Clarke always keeps a travel journal, and was intrigued by what would happen if such a diary, with its ‘smears of sunscreen and grains of sand’, was read by someone else. What would it reveal about the writer? People go traveling for two reasons: because they are searching for something, or they are running from something.

La gente viaggia per due motivi: perché cerca qualcosa o perché scappa da qualcosa. Nel mio caso sono veri entrambi. I'm pretty conflicted on this book. Initially I enjoyed the premise: Mia sets off traveling after the death of her mother and dies whilst in Bali, a country that was never on her original route. The authorities tell her sister Katie, her only remaining family, that she committed suicide but her sister knows this cant be true and tries to retrace her steps using Mia's travel journal to uncover what really happened.