Book Review: "The Good Sister" by Sally Hepworth
“The Good Sister” by Sally Hepworth
Synopsis: There's only been one time that Rose couldn't stop me from doing the wrong thing and that was a mistake that will haunt me for the rest of my life.
Fern Castle works in her local library. She has dinner with her twin sister Rose three nights a week. And she avoids crowds, bright lights and loud noises as much as possible. Fern has a carefully structured life and disrupting her routine can be...dangerous.
When Rose discovers that she cannot get pregnant, Fern sees her chance to pay her sister back for everything Rose has done for her. Fern can have a baby for Rose. She just needs to find a father. Simple.
Fern's mission will shake the foundations of the life she has carefully built for herself and stir up dark secrets from the past, in this quirky, rich and shocking story of what families keep hidden.
Rating: 3.75
Trigger Warnings: emotional and physical abuse, infertility, abusive family dynamics
Review: I’ve read several books (and listened to several podcasts) recently about sociopaths, and honestly, I don’t hate it. It’s spiced up my reading life, and it’s given me new and scary things to focus my anxiety on that I hadn’t previously considered — like, what if my sibling is a crazy person and has been gaslighting me my whole life? Luckily, I don’t think that’s the case for me, but it definitely was for the main character of Sally Hepworth’s newest family tale.
In “The Good Sister,” we spend time with two sisters, actually - high-achieving Rose, who on paper has everything together, and her flighty, slightly-lost sister, Fern, who on paper has nothing together. The book switches between their two viewpoints, and honestly, you don’t ever really know who to believe. As the book opens, Rose is positioned as the competent and smart one, and Fern is almost written as though she has an intellectual disability. I can’t really go into more detail than that without totally spoiling the book, but I’ll just say that things aren’t always what they seem.
I spent most of the book a little unmoored — I didn’t know who was right or who to trust in telling the story, and while I knew things were a little off (hello! look at the synopsis!), I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. I was increasingly anxious for Fern, as she seemed a bit like a baby bird, especially as her pregnancy progressed. That said, while I knew things were going to go off the rails at some point, I in no way predicted how Sally Hepworth would wrap this up.
This is my second book by her (I read “Mother-in-Law” a few summers ago), and I have to say that I really enjoy her dark twists on family relationships. There’s nothing abnormal about the stories that she’s telling — family dinners! pregnancy and surrogacy! — but there’s always something sinister under the surface, and while I don’t want that in my real life, I love it in my book life.
In a lot of ways, this reminded me of “Verity” by Colleen Hoover — the same unreliable narrator, similar villainess tropes — and I think I enjoyed this one more. The long-term relationship between sisters felt more sinister than that of lovers, and I enjoy seeing the long game play out. It was not nearly as gratuitously or explicitly violent as “Verity,” which is a major selling point for this wuss.
TL;DR: A twisted tale about sisters, family, and the secrets we’ll keep to protect those we love.
If You Liked This, Try These:
“My Sister, the Serial Killer” by Oyinkan Braithwaite (Bookshop | Kindle | My Review)
“We Came Here to Forget” by Angela Dunlop (Bookshop | Kindle)
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