The Seven Sisters

This is the first book in a continuing series that the author has been releasing progressively since 2014 that will be best read in sequence.

Maia is the eldest of six adopted, unrelated sisters (the seventh a mystery) of a billionaire called Pa Salt who raised them on a private Swiss estate. When he dies, each sister is given messages with clues as to their origins. Maia is the first to undertake such an investigation. This takes her to a crumbling mansion in Rio de Janeiro. With the help Floriano, a local author, she begins to untangle her family history.

Split between contemporary narrative and events in the late 1920s, this is a whopper of nearly 650 pages and requires some commitment to see it through to the end with its inevitable peaks and troughs. There are overwritten passages that could have been pruned by at least a third without losing anything. As is always the case with two narrative strands, the reader is likely to favour one over the other.

The thwarted romantic life of Maia’s great-grandmother Izabela and the sculptor Laurent in Paris and Rio has its fair share of drama and tear-jerking moments. The descriptions of culture and society in Brazil during this era add extra colour.  Also, of specific historical interest is the story of the design process and construction of the famous Christ the Redeemer statue.

The main reason behind Maia’s reclusive, reserved character is revealed by the conclusion, but there are several loose ends regarding her birth parents and another individual important to her that may be tied up in subsequent instalments of this epic series. Clearly, once hooked, one is compelled to keep reading the books in sequence to find out more.
 
Three-and-a-half stars

 
Amazon.com (audio)

Amazon.co.uk (Kindle)
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