The Half Sister by Sandie Jones

Hello everyone.  I hope your day is going well.

I cannot believe it's June!  The beginning of June always reminds me of the family that lived next door when I was a kid.  The Mom was our beloved elementary school nurse and was an avid gardener.  The Dad built and flew model airplanes.  They had four children.  Two were older but one girl was my age, and one was my sisters'.  Needless to say, we played together a lot.  Heck, I still remember their phone number! It's weird how some things you remember like naming the tree in their front yard "old chucker," the sledding down the back hill, riding bikes, swimming, and the endless games of Red Light Green Light.  Of course, now they are all married, some with kids, and scattered across the country.  I often think of how lucky we were to have such wonderful neighbors. Today is the birthday of that friend, a date that somehow, I've never forgotten.  

I recently read The Half Sister by Sandie Jones.  I've read two books by this author, The First Mistake and The Other Woman.  I liked both very much.  The Half Sister is about two sisters, Kate and Lauren, who are grieving the loss of their devoted father.  One Sunday, while at their mother's house for dinner, a woman comes the door asking to see their father.  When they discover the mysterious woman claims to be their half-sister, they are skeptical but start wondering about different moments from the family's past.  When the woman produces a DNA test, the world falls apart and secrets start being revealed.  Who is telling the truth and who is lying?  This book takes that issue I love of unreliable narrators and spreads it to someone who never appears in the book and is dead before it starts.  Could his life have been a lie?  

This novel is quite the ride and literally has twists until the very end.  If you don't like family drama type thrillers, then stay clear but otherwise I doubt you'd be disappointed.  More likely, you'll be cold from all that rapid page turning!  Another win for Jones.

I don't know what I was thinking, I should have sent my friend this book for her birthday.  That would certainly have made it happy.

The Other Woman by Sandie Jones

Are you ever just so tired that you feel like a slug? Probably no. You are likely one of those annoying, eternally perky people. I detest you. I really do. Okay, maybe I'm jealous. So what? I'm just in a mood, noticing all those signs of aging and resenting the young. My friend said she pulled a muscle the other day just putting on her bra. Hell, I pulled my back just sneezing "the wrong way".  People told me the day I hit 40 it would start, the very day...like on my birthday. Sadly, those wack-a-doodles were completely right. Now this is where I'll write nothing else, since I just mentioned turning 40 and act like I just had that milestone. In actuality, I've lied about my age so much recently when the doctor asked me how old I was, I had to get out my fingers to count. (Get them out, like they were "put away".) I'd say I got out an abacus, but you are all probably too young to even know what that is, which will really tick me off, which will make me sigh and feel even more tired. You see this aging thing is a vicious circle.

Anyway, after reading the amazing 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, I needed a break. I picked a thriller called The Other Woman by Sandie Jones. Honestly, I chose it because it is recent and shorter, just under 300 pages. This book was a great break for my character-laden brain. It follows a girl, Emily, who falls in love with Adam. Unfortunately Adam has a wicked Mother, who doesn't like Emily.  Seemed like a plot that has been done quite a bit. Just turn on the TV any Saturday afternoon, bypass the 9,000th showing of Shawshank Redemption (still love ya Stephen King) and Dirty Dancing, to see Jane Fonda in action in Monster-in-Law. The common plot didn't bother me, obviously, since I bought the book and it called to me from my stack to read. I'm glad it did. Sandie Jones is the kind of writer I like. She skips the BS. Not that background story is BS, but...how do I explain it? If she says something is going to happen on Wednesday, the story immediately skips to that event on Wednesday. I love it. No waiting while the characters do their laundry on Tuesday night, making me wonder why I'm spending so much time reading this book instead of doing my own laundry. Nope, Sandie Jones skips to the good stuff. THANK YOU! This made the book so much faster paced and so much more pleasant to read. The story moves quickly to a conclusion which I am certain I had figured out, but alas was happily wrong again.

A very pleasant read, would make a great plane or beach read.