Review of THE PEARL SISTER by Lucinda Riley

3 Stars 

This is the fourth book in The Seven Sisters series to which I am listening on my morning walks. 

Six girls were adopted by Pa Salt, an ultra-wealthy man.  After he dies, each daughter is given a letter and a clue to her true heritage.   Each daughter’s journey is the subject of a novel.  The Pearl Sister is the story of the fourth daughter, CeCe.

CeCe needs to go to Australia to find her family, but she stops in Thailand for an extended stay where a mysterious man named Ace befriends her.  When she resumes her travels and continues to Australia, she learns about Kitty McBride and the Mercer family whose enterprises included pearling in Western Australia.  She also discovers a possible connection to the Aboriginals; her exposure to their culture reawakens her artistic creativity.

The structure is the same as that of the previous books.  There’s the present where CeCe sets out to find her origins which are somehow connected to Kitty Mercer.   The narrative in the past focuses on Kitty McBride who leaves Scotland, marries into the Mercer family, and moves to Broome with her husband who is in charge of the family’s pearling interests.  Kitty encounters indigenous peoples and hates how they are regarded and treated by the European colonists.  As with the other books, there’s more focus on distant ancestors like a great-great-grandmother than on a mother.  Wouldn’t CeCe be more interested in her mother’s story?  In the novel, her mother’s story is almost an afterthought.

CeCe is not my favourite sister.  She comes across as whiny.  She has had a privileged upbringing and has been able to travel the world.  Yet she is always feeling sorry for herself and complaining how no one understands her and her art.  She does seem to experience some personal growth, but I found I didn’t really care.  One thing that bothered me is the portrayal of her dyslexia which seems to be equated with a lack of education:  CeCe doesn’t know the word genocide and has never heard of Darwin?

As with the other books, I enjoyed the historical information I gleaned:  the pearling industry in Australia, Aboriginal culture and art, and the mistreatment of the Indigenous Peoples (which has so many unfortunate parallels with Canada’s treatment of its First Nations peoples).  I found myself researching the art of Albert Namatjira. 

What I did not enjoy is the forbidden love stories and the love-at-first-sight tropes which appear in all the books.  Coincidence is certainly overused in this novel so that it is difficult to suspend disbelief.  A child is found in the Outback by a relative unaware of his existence?  A pearl which is cursed keeps cropping up, even in CeCe’s timeline?  And the entire section set in Thailand seems irrelevant and could be omitted. 

As I’ve stated in previous reviews of this series, I will continue listening to these books on my morning walks because they provide pure escapism that allows my easily distracted mind to wander.