What do readers think of The Sisterhood by Helen Bryan? Write your own review.

The author of The Sisterhood does a very good job at blending two stories set almost 500 years apart in two different countries on two continents. She brings everything together in a very believable way. Her characters are beautifully crafted as are the settings in the book. She uses art very skillfully to interpret Bible stories which do present interpretations not accepted by the Catholic faith, but seems to do so in a non-challenging way with an historical basis for those interpretations. The historic and current stories unfold slowly so that the culmination is well-explained. I thought this was an enjoyable read and well-researched.

I very much enjoyed The Sisterhood, which I found to be a real page-turner. The author is skilled at creating individual characters (and there are a lot of them in this book), and I think she was successful in managing her dual narrative structure. This would be a good book for book clubs with its non-preachy examination of women's rights and religious tolerance through the ages. Be warned that there are a few logical disjuncts and at least one mighty fortuitous coincidence as well as some quibbling caveats such as why does the Spanish police officer who attended an university and a police academy in America for five years speak in pidgin English? On the whole, a very enjoyable and fast read.

I really wanted to love this book because the portal through which we glimpse the lives of 16th upper class Spanish women whose lives are intertwined with the convent "Las Golondrinas" is fascinating. However the author flips clumsily between the present and the past while weaving a predictable plot so while the book is interesting it is not one that I can recommend without reservations.