Book Review: The Wildling Sisters

Last year, Eve Chase swept me away with her novel, Black Rabbit Hall. I loved the atmosphere, the mystery, the characters, and the writing. While I didn't enjoy this one quite as much, it was a riveting read. Very similar in tone and setting, The Wildling Sisters charts stories from two different times (a modern woman's life intersects with the past lives in a house she inhabits). The stories are set in the English countryside in an old manor home. This particular setting always sucks me in and I'm happy to allow my imagination to take up residence alongside the characters.

In 1959, fifteen-year-old Margo Wilde spends her summer at Applecote Manor together with her three sisters. They are apprehensive because they haven't visited the Manor, or their aunt and uncle, in five years, not since their cousin Audrey disappeared. Fifty years later, Jessie and her widowed husband Will purchase Applecote Manor in an attempt to solidify their new family. Jessie hopes to flee the tenacious grip of Will's dead wife and finally bond fully with his recalcitrant teenage daughter, Bella. But Bella is fixated on the stories swirling about the house's mysterious past and determined not to let Jessie or her toddler step-sister Romy into her heart.

Eve Chase did a marvelous job of introducing new enticing details with each progressive chapter. The book opens with a bang as the Wildling sisters drag away a dead body. Whose body? Why and how did he die? In the second chapter, we meet Jessie and a host of new questions. Why was Bella expelled from her school? Will the move to the countryside strengthen their family bonds or sever them further? With expert pacing, the reader happily swings from past to present as the separate stories unfold until they converge in the telling reveal.

I read the entire second half of the novel while waiting in the car as Trevor attended his football team's away game. Two hours slipped away. This was a splendid tale of two vastly different bonds: those between close siblings and those between blended family members. It bears hints of Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca blended with Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. Kate Morton fans will find a comfortable fit in an Eve Chase novel. Still, I believe Chase's debut, Black Rabbit Hall, was a notch better.