TLC Book Tours Book Review: The Hurricane Sisters

About The Hurricane Sisters

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks (April 7, 2015)

Hurricane season begins early and rumbles all summer long, well into September. Often people's lives reflect the weather and The Hurricane Sisters is just such a story.

Once again Dorothea Benton Frank takes us deep into the heart of her magical South Carolina Lowcountry on a tumultuous journey filled with longings, disappointments, and, finally, a road toward happiness that is hard earned. There we meet three generations of women buried in secrets. The determined matriarch, Maisie Pringle, at eighty, is a force to be reckoned with because she will have the final word on everything, especially when she's dead wrong. Her daughter, Liz, is caught up in the classic maelstrom of being middle-age and in an emotionally demanding career that will eventually open all their eyes to a terrible truth. And Liz's beautiful twenty-something daughter, Ashley, whose dreamy ambitions of her unlikely future keeps them all at odds.

Luckily for Ashley, her wonderful older brother, Ivy, is her fierce champion but he can only do so much from San Francisco where he resides with his partner. And Mary Beth, her dearest friend, tries to have her back but even she can't talk headstrong Ashley out of a relationship with an ambitious politician who seems slightly too old for her.

Actually, Ashley and Mary Beth have yet to launch themselves into solvency. Their prospects seem bleak. So while they wait for the world to discover them and deliver them from a ramen-based existence, they placate themselves with a hare-brained scheme to make money but one that threatens to land them in huge trouble with the authorities.

So where is Clayton, Liz's husband? He seems more distracted than usual. Ashley desperately needs her father's love and attention but what kind of a parent can he be to Ashley with one foot in Manhattan and the other one planted in indiscretion? And Liz, who's an expert in the field of troubled domestic life, refuses to acknowledge Ashley's precarious situation. Who's in charge of this family? The wake-up call is about to arrive.

The Lowcountry has endured its share of war and bloodshed like the rest of the South, but this storm season we watch Maisie, Liz, Ashley, and Mary Beth deal with challenges that demand they face the truth about themselves. After a terrible confrontation they are forced to rise to forgiveness, but can they establish a new order for the future of them all?

Frank, with her hallmark scintillating wit and crisp insight, captures how a complex family of disparate characters and their close friends can overcome anything through the power of love and reconciliation. This is the often hilarious, sometimes sobering, but always entertaining story of how these unforgettable women became The Hurricane Sisters.

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Review: Dorothea Benton Frank is one of my favorite authors, and one that can't rightly explain to anyone the why of it. I find many of her novels to follow a formula, yet I gobble them up like a good bag of potato chips.

I love the Lowcountry setting. It always makes me wish that I were there.

There's always some huge drama in Frank's books and this one is no different. She's tackling date rape/domestic abuse here, and there's ALWAYS a cheating husband. What bugged me about this one is that Liz is really a doormat.

I preferred when her heroines were stronger, though I'll give her credit for writing characters that are absolute jerks. Ashley's senator boyfriend, gave the word jerk a new meaning. However when it comes to being a ditsy broad, Ashley took the cake. She claimed Jackie Kennedy was her idol, well, even Jackie had a backbone when it came to JFK's roving eye.

Even when she finally wises up she still wants to emulate someone other than herself. Yes, the character is 23, but it bugged me that she wanted to be like someone from the past, rather than herself.

Maisie was the only character I really liked and when you have a novel that revolves around three women, it makes the reading a bit hard. And even Maisie isn't perfect. I can't imagine a mother pushing a daughter to stay with a man that cheated like Clayton did. In my eyes, cheating is an unforgivable sin.

And while the whole underlying theme of this book was domestic violence, how everything tied together and even how it affected Ashley, it was too watered down to make an impact.

So, yeah, this wasn't my favorite of Frank's books, but it won't stop me from waiting for the next.

Rating: 3 flowers

About Dorothea Benton Frank

New York Times bestselling author Dorothea Benton Frank was born and raised on Sullivans Island, South Carolina. She is the author of many New York Times bestselling novels, including Lowcountry Summer and Return to Sullivans Island. She resides in the New York area with her husband. Find her on the web at www.dotfrank.com, and connect with her on Facebook and Twitter.