The Sweeney Sisters by Lian Dolan
3.5/5.
Liza, Maggie, and Tricia Sweeney are three sisters who, though they have their share of conflict, know what it means to rely on one another in the worst of times. When their father, a celebrated but deeply flawed author, dies unexpectedly and it is revealed the girls' childhood neighbor is actually their secret sister, they all must come to terms with their father's flaws, their own shortcomings, and their new definition of what it means to be family.
Dolan imbues this novel with a fantastic sense of its setting; Southport, Connecticut, the picturesque small-town suburb just a train ride away from NYC comes to life in this story. The classic tropes of the small town gossip mill, tensions between New England's upper stratum and grinders looking to make their own American Dream a reality, and the dreamy romanticism of one of America's vacation destinations come together to create a beautiful and pertinent backdrop.
For me, the best and most interesting thing about this story was its portrait of sisterhood in all its many forms. Not only does Dolan understand the ever-present balance between power struggles and familial bonds, but she interrogates the very definition of sisterhood and asks the question of whether it is shared experiences or shared blood that create that bond. The novel is an insightful and, at least from my experience, honest exploration of the messiness and love that makes up close family relationships.
The great pitfall of this novel came from the writing itself. There were many instances in which it felt that Dolan rushed through months worth of exposition in a single paragraph in an effort to get to 'the good stuff,' and while the pieces of the story that were dramatized were engaging, they felt slightly flat without the layers of set-up. Additionally, many of the characters, notably Liza and Tricia, felt two-dimensional due to Dolan's tendency to tell instead of show. A twist at the end finds three sisters laughing over their personalities being distilled down into "a frigid control freak," "an undisciplined dilettante," and "a hussy but now you're too uptight to party," but the humor is hard to buy into when the three characters rarely were given the opportunity to break out of their assigned archetypes in any meaningful way.
The dialogue frequently fell flat for me, and several lines felt like they were written to be excerpted and quoted ad nauseum. Aphorisms aren't inherently a bad thing, but 300 pages worth of them get to be somewhat exhausting.
All in all, this is a story with an excellent premise and an adequate plot. If the characters had been fully developed and the story dramatized to its full potential rather than summarized, it would have been a five star read.
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