Shadow Sister: A Novel by Lindsay Marcott

 

SCENE: an unreasonably nice apartment crammed with an equally unreasonable amount of designer clothes for someone on an alleged writer's salary 

CUT TO:

Barrie Cadshaw, sitting at her stupidly expensive desk: As I set down SHADOW SISTER, I couldn't help but wonder. Am I revealing my own internalized misogyny by not liking deliberately amoral female characters? Is Harlotte right? Does feminism really mean gatekeep, gaslight, girlboss? Do women just want to fuck shit up like a washing machine with a whole load of dry clean-only French lingerie?

Barrie looks directly into Camera 1 while biting into one of her designer handbags: The world may never know. 

The designer handbag crunches ominously as she chews.

END SCENE

After reading-- and loving!-- Lindsay Marcott's Jane Eyre retelling, MRS. ROCHESTER'S GHOST, I was eager to read literally anything else she wrote next. So you can imagine my delight when that "something else" turned out to be another gothic thriller with some family secrets and romantic elements. Also, my friend Heather buddy-read this with me! Check out her review, she's the best!

The plot of this book is difficult to explain. It's multi-POV, dual timeline. In the present timeline, we're treated to Ava and Sarah. Ava is part of the Holland Blackworth family, storied San Francisco Bay Area royalty. Their mansion has a whole shit-ton of history and it might also be haunted, as she found out one night during the accident that resulted in her brother's injury that left him half-blind. There's also Sarah Ellington, a widowed socialite who meets Ava's brother James at the college he teaches at. The two of them develop a whirlwind romance that quickly starts seeming a little shady as Sarah treats boundaries the way cats treat your belongings (deliberately knocking them over or ignoring them entirely, whichever is going to piss you off more). In the past, in 2006, we're treated to Didi, the poor daughter of a maid who cleans the houses of the rich. She also has 99 problems, and 96 of those are her own doing. The other three she's willing to take care of herself-- at any cost. How past and present tie together is one of the mysteries that slowly gets unraveled over the course of the storyline.

I have a lot of thoughts but I don't want to spoil the book. So I'll try to be brief (and spoiler-free). I guessed one of the major twists about a quarter of the way through the book, so most of the mystery was me just waiting to be proven wrong. I also really hated the Sarah character. There's unlikable and there's "bitch, I hope you're writing me a letter of recommendation to the pearly gates because I'm a saint for putting up with you." She is the latter (in case you couldn't guess). The book was pretty good apart from those two things, well-written and tightly plotted, but it was just a little too melodramatic and I wish the romance had played a more prominent role.

 2.5 to 3 out of 5 stars