My family and I moved to a new place recently and with so much there has been to do, both before and after the move, my reading life has unfortunately suffered these past few weeks. Hopefully, as we get settled in over the next week or so, I am able to get back into my reading groove and catch up on the books that I had planned to read last month but didn’t get a chance to.
With that said, during this chaotic time, I did manage to finish one book, though it took way longer than it usually would have, both due to the lack of time to read as well as the difficulty on my part with focusing on what I was reading. It also probably didn’t help that the book I chose to read – Martha Hall Kelly’s newest release Sunflower Sisters -- turned out to be 500+ pages. This is technically the third book in the Lilac Girls series and while I still haven’t gotten around to reading the first book, I did read the second one, Lost Roses, when it came out back in 2019 and it ended up being a 5 star read for me. So despite the bad timing, I still went into this one with a high amount of anticipation, especially knowing the story would continue to be about the same extended family from the first two books. This time around, the story is set several generations earlier, during the Civil War period, with the indomitable Woolsey women (Caroline Ferriday’s ancestors) and the beginnings of the family’s long history of philanthropy. Similar to Kelly’s previous 2 books, the story is narrated from the perspectives of multiple characters: Georgeanna “Georgy” Woolsey (one of Caroline Ferriday’s great-aunts), whose strong determination and passion for nursing leads to a calling to join the war effort as a Union nurse; Jemma, enslaved with her family on the Peeler Plantation in Maryland, yearns to free herself and her kin from the constant abuse and fear they suffer at the hands of the plantation’s mistress Anne-May as well as its cruel overseer Lebaron; Anne-May inherits a plantation that she doesn’t know how to run and after both her husband as well as beloved brother enlist in the army, she falls in with the wrong crowd and becomes ensnared in a secret network of spies.
While I did enjoy this book quite a bit, I felt that the story was a tad slow in places and at times, was bogged down by details that didn’t seem all that necessary. At 500+ pages, this is already a long book and when you add a slow-moving plot too, it can seem like a chore to read. Fortunately, the characters were well-developed and easy to connect with, which did make up a bit for the slowness of the story overall. I also found the story arcs told from the points-of-view of Jemma and Anne-May a lot more interesting and engaging than the one narrated from Georgy’s perspective. I actually felt the same way when I read Lost Roses too — the story arcs from the perspectives of the other characters were much more engaging than the one from the Ferriday/Woolsey characters. Of course, that’s not to say I didn’t like the characters because that’s not the case at all — in fact, I liked all the Woolsey sisters and especially loved Georgy’s personality. It’s just that plot-wise, the other characters’ chapters seemed to move the story along more.
Overall, I did enjoy this one, but so far, I like Lost Roses more. It seems that for most readers who’ve read the entire series, Lilac Girls is still the favorite. As mentioned earlier, I haven’t gotten around to reading Lilac Girls yet, but I hope to rectify that soon if I can!
Received ARC from Ballantine Books via NetGalley.
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