The Christmas Sisters by Sarah Morgan

The title really sums the book up - it's about 3 sisters and how they spend one Christmas.  One Christmas coming to terms with a tragic accident 25 years ago and trying to regain their closeness as a family unit.  Unfortunately, the characters of the sisters are, how to put this tactfully, rather stereotypical.  We have Beth who is the stay at home mum to 2 daughters who is desperate to reclaim an adult life for herself outside the home; Hannah who is the career woman and pushes everyone away from her and Posy who is the tomboy following in her parents footsteps who wants to leave home for adventure but is afraid of upsetting the family.

To be perfectly honest I never really felt any connection to the characters on the page at all.  Even Suzannah, the family matriarch, is fairly flat as a person - her whole reason for living seems to be to provide for her girls and little is made of her entrepeneurship.  The story itself is quite good - the tension between the various family members is well described and the mystery of the avalanche is drawn out over most of the book with the reader only finding out the real circumstances behind it roughly 3/4 of the way through.  By that point though I was reading to finish rather than reading to find out what happened.  Even worse Patrick is regularly mentioned and described as the rock of the family but he hardly makes an appearance in the book at all as an actual person - we hear far more from the lodger Luke, Beth's husband and Hannah's boyfriend than we do from him.  I also struggled with how saintly Suzannah and Patrick were portrayed in the book, it really was cloying in places.

The village set scenes were probably the best thing about the book.  The claustrophobia of small communities was apparent throughout and yet it is a strangely welcome claustrophobia where everyone is supportive whilst sticking their noses in.  Not too sure about the Craft Cafe though, it did have more than a touch of my bete noir in novels the strangely overly successful small business in an unlikely location.

I'm not sure why I struggled to connect with this book so much - maybe it is because I am an Only Child so the family dynamics exposed here are beyond my ken.  The writing itself is accomplished and I can understand the attraction for readers in the author's books, it just didn't do "it" for me.  So much so I did wonder if I was reading the same book that others have reviewed so glowingly.