We Are Family

Three and a half stars. Laura and Jess are sisters. Jess, the elder, is happily married to a lawyer, has two immaculate daughters and has a successful career as a social media influencer. Laura is a journalist for a women's magazine called Natter (which I misread throughout the book as Nutter), living with her boyfriend and their five year old son Billy. Whereas Jess is Marie Kondo, White Company, Farrow and Ball and Le Creuset, Laura has never really changed from her student days, their flat is piled high with dirty dishes, drying clothes and stacks of paper, it doesn't help that Laura's boyfriend only works part-time at a pizza restaurant because he is writing a book (although Laura knows he's been writing it for 10 years and has less than two pages written to show for his time. The death of their self-centred mother from cancer is yet another bone 0f contention between the sisters at first, but maybe, just maybe it can bring them closer together. Ah, women's fiction! A story where there is any amount of huge life changes and surprises all of which are pretty much glossed over - if all the things happened to my sister and me that happened to these two women in the the course of less than 12 months (COVID-excepted) I would be in serious need of therapy. I didn't enjoy this at first, in fact I was seriously considering giving up after about 25% because I found both sisters so irritating, but I persevered and really got into the story, although I still feel the strong desire to shake Laura and tell her to woman up and grow a pair. Then, the novel just ended really abruptly with an eight months later epilogue in which pretty much everything had changed, it was as though Nicola Gill had run out of paper and had to wrap everything up really quickly, or maybe she had a dentist appointment? Anyway, I literally flipped my Kindle pages back and forth looking for the rest of the book ... I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with women's fiction because (like life) there is no resolution, no HEA, just an abrupt 'and this is where I choose to end my book' which leaves me a bit dissatisfied. However, so much of my griping can be put down to 'don't read women's fiction if you don't like the way it's structured' so make your own decision. Overall, I did enjoy this but I found the ending rushed and I had more questions than answers. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.