Honno Welsh Women’s Press, 26 January 2023. ISBN: 978-1-91290576-8
(PB)
Judith Barrow may not write conventional crime fiction, but you can be
sure of one thing when you pick up one of her books: a cracking good story,
about people you can relate to and come to root for or the opposite. There’s
crime of a less headline-making kind than the usual string of murders, and
there’s plenty of that worst crime of all – man’s inhumanity to man. Or woman,
as the case may be.
Sisters is pretty much what it says on the cover: a story of
two sisters. Mandy and Angie are close in childhood but torn apart by a
horrific accident followed by a web of lies, then thrust into each other’s path
again by death in the family. When it begins, Mandy is thirteen and still into
childlike pursuits, Angie is sixteen and thinks it’s grown-up to wear make-up
and chase boys. They take their baby brother for a walk; Angie shows off to the
local poseur and loses control of the pram on a steep hill. The baby dies, and
instead of owning up, Angie lets Mandy take the blame, causing a rift which
blows the family asunder.
That’s only the beginning, of
course. The girls grow up geographically as well as emotionally distanced, and
the very different life paths they follow could be interpreted as each getting
her just deserts. After the accident they don’t meet again for over twenty
years, and only then when their mother dies. And that is when things become
very interesting indeed for them both, and even more so for the reader.
It’s all about the
characters, of course, especially the two sisters. Mandy, who changes her name
to Lisa as a way to slough off the past, is nurtured into a good education and
career by a loving aunt and uncle. Angie’s guilt catches up with her big time,
eventually pushing her into an abusive marriage. Both are portrayed as rounded
personalities, and Judith Barrow shows great skill in gaining the reader’s
sympathy for Angie as much as Lisa.
The girls’ parents,
especially their frail father, supportive Aunt Barb and Uncle Chris, Angie’s
sociopathic husband Stephen, Ben the reporter who finds the nefarious
significance of a contentious strip of land... all of them feel real, and draw
the reader into the story, as do Barrow’s accounts of the run-down Yorkshire
town, the pretty Welsh seaside village and the squalid squat in Manchester.
The book soon becomes the
kind you can’t put down; when I reached the end, I looked at the clock and
found it was past two in the morning. Judith Barrow had done it again. ------ Reviewer: Lynne Patrick
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