Three Sisters

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In 1942, fifteen year old Livia and nineteen year old Cibi are rounded up and taken to Auschwitz while their seventeen year old sister, Magda, escapes the roundup because she is in the nearby hospital. Their fight for survival takes them from the hell of Auschwitz, to a death march across war-torn Europe and eventually home to Slovakia, now under iron Communist rule. When one begins to falter, the others are there to protect her, to nurse her back to health, or to remind her of their promise. As this story begins, it is June of 1929 and the setting is Vranov nad Topl’ou in Slovakia where three sisters, Cibi, Magda and Livi are sitting in their backyard with their father. He knows he will be having a surgery the next day, and wants them to promise him one thing, a promise that they will always take care of each other, no matter what happens.

This was the first time I realised her heroism: the way my mother and her two sisters survived those horrible times. That's a hard promise to make as people are different, have different personalities and life takes us in all different directions. Magda had been sick and was in the hospital recuperating when the Nazis were making their selections for deportation. Thank you to the wonderful team at Echo Publishing for an early copy of the book to read and review. In her interviews with the sisters, Morris has gleaned detailed recollections that allowed her to turn their memories into a jolting narrative, complete with the names of actual guards and “kapos” who worked at the camp, and prisoners they befriended.From reading the blurb, I was expecting this to be about the revenge act, but instead, there are a lot of other things that feed into this narrative and I consequently felt bored by how long the main plot development was happening. From there hours of interviews took place resulting in Morris bringing the story of the three sisters to the world. Heather Morris is the global bestselling author of The Tattooist of Auschwitz and Cilka’s Journey, which have sold eight million copies worldwide. Three Sisters was an exploration of courage, a reminder of how important family is and the continued efforts to keep a most important promise made so long ago.

I wished for a more sophisticated telling, but other readers might find its simplicity a comfort from the horrors of the story. His mother and her sisters had been at the camps with Sokolov; miraculously, all three survived and went on to emigrate to Israel.For those that have read the previous two books, there are brief appearances of Lale, Gita, and Cilka.

These characters brought nothing new to the over-saturated genre and the repetitive feel made the book drag. As with this author's previous books, nothing is straightforward forward and to try to explain the story. While all are primarily set during WWII in concentrations camps, each ends a bit differently – representing very different paths survivors took.I couldn’t take their conversations seriously as their immaturity and babyish behaviour and dialogue took away from the harrowing storyline, the true grit and the heaviness of the times. With thanks to Boldwood books and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.