Publisher: Harper
Pages: 400
Format: ARC
ISBN-10: 0062355880
ISBN-13: 9780062355881
Harper: eBook | Hardcover | AudioBook
Haunted by the history of their family where suicide seems to be one of the most common causes of death three sisters decide to make an end to their lives. They all have their own reason and make an agreement that first they will write down their story and end their life on the last day of 1999.
While writing down their story you meet their great-grand-mother, married to a Jewish Nobel Prize-winning chemist who developed the predecessor to Zyklon B. Grandpa Richard and his children and their own parents. All these lives have a great influence how Lady, Vee and Delph look at their own lives. Bound together by all their bad experiences, only feeling safe when they are together they are slowly working to their end.
This sound like a dreadful book full of dead people or people wanting to die but it is not. Well not really. Depending what your sense of humour is I guess. This book is 400 pages of gallows humour. Though I love this kind of humour it got obnoxious halfway trough the book. There was to much and it never stopped. It felt desperate and forced. The whole story is about death and coincidence. How can it be that the Zyklon B gas that killed so many Jews in the WWII was invented by a Jew. How can it be that all the people in the family seem to kill themselves. As some really serious subjects are mentioned it is brought as one big joke. The sisters only start to talk about what they plan to do later on while it is a decision of life and death and even than they discuss it as if they are making a grocery list. In the beginning it was fun but as the story developed it started to annoy me a lot. Still in all honesty you cannot put the book down as you have to know how it ends.
From the start it is clear what character you are supposed to cheer for, which one you should try not to pity and which one is a bit weird. Though this can be annoying it did work with this story. Still it did not stop me from getting frustrated with the characters and hoping for more. There are some surprising twists in both the woman their personalities and the story that made me forgive them a bit but in the end I did not enjoy it as much as I had expected.
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