The Edelweiss Sisters by Kate Hewitt ~ a Review

by Donna Huber

I've been reading the cozy mysteries from Bookouture for a while now but hadn't had a chance to try their historical fiction and they publish quite a bit of WWII fiction which you know is one of my favorite genres. It was with great expectations that I picked up The Edelweiss Sisters by Kate Hewitt.

Amazon affiliate links are used on this site. A free book was provided for an honest review.

June 2021; Bookouture; 978-1800193000
audio, ebook, print (386 pages); historical fiction

The first thing I noticed when I started this book was the feeling of deja vu. It felt like I was about to read a version of The Sound of Music. The three sisters are getting ready for a singing festival. The book is also set in Salzburg, Austria where the von Trapp family lived. In fact, Maria von Trapp has a brief cameo. The sisters singing though is just a very small piece of the story as they don't actually sing together again.

I felt like the story was a bit slow at the beginning. I had trouble getting into it but that may be because I've read several WWII stories in the past few months and I'm needing a break from it. But as I got to know the characters more, the more I needed to know how their lives turned out. The prologue haunted me as I tried to figure out who survived the war.

A few other real people had cameos in the story who I recognized like Corrie ten Boom. But it was the places that I was more familiar with like Ravensbruck (it is the concentration camp featured in Martha Hall Kelly's The Lilac Girls) where medical experiments were carried out on women prisoners.

One of the characters made a statement that struck me as appropriate for the times we are living in now: "I do not fear death," he replied quietly, "Nor should you. I fear facing my Maker and having no answer for Him as to why I did not act when I could have."

While I don't feel like this is a Christian novel so to speak, the family is Catholic and one of the sisters is a nun. So for me personally, her religious journey gave me a lot to think about in my own faith journey.

For me, this book was so much more about the characters than it was about the plot. So if you enjoy character-driven stories where you really come to care about the characters, then this is the book for you.

Buy The Edelweiss Sisters at Amazon

Donna Huber is an avid reader and natural encourager. She is the founder of Girl Who Reads and the author of how-to marketing book Secrets to a Successful Blog Tour.

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