ShortBookandScribes #BookReview – The Sea Stone Sisters by Eleanor Buchanan

The Sea Stone Sisters by Eleanor Buchanan is published by Headline and is available now. My thanks to the publishers for the proof copy which I think was a surprise and what a lovely surprise it turned out to be.

Like the stones in their rings, the sisters were meant to stay together.
Now they were scattered across the world.

1931. When Iris Blackmore’s father knocks down the Sisters of Skara standing stones, a dark shadow falls on her family that will echo down through generations. With their fortune lost, the four Blackmore sisters are scattered to the four winds, taking only the rings they inherited from their beloved mother.

Present day.  Grieving and adrift, Roz Chatton leaves her home in Australia, arriving in London with little other than her late mother’s ring. When she stumbles upon a painting of four ancient standing stones, she feels the past calling to her. Drawn to Scotland, Roz begins to unearth a long-forgotten mystery, and a secret that lies waiting for her within her mother’s ring …

Four lost sisters. An epic journey home. Will you follow?

The Sea Stone Sisters is book one in what I presume will be a quartet, focusing on the four Blackmore sisters who once lived with their parents on Skara, a remote peninsula in Scotland. Legend has it that if the four standing stones are ever laid flat then a curse will fall upon the family. For a while it doesn’t seem to Iris, the eldest of the sisters, that the curse has come true but as time passes she has to revise her opinion. With the aim of saving her sisters and the family estate from ruin, she travels to Ceylon to try to locate their Uncle Ralph in the hope that he will be able to help them.

Intertwined with Iris’s story in the early 1930s is the current day narrative of Roz, an Australian who, after a family tragedy, travels to London and stumbles across a painting of four standing stones. Why does this painting bewitch her so and why does it feel as though her opal ring pulsates when she’s near it?

This is a beguiling story of family and sacrifice. Iris is a lovely character, refined, determined and brave and I very much enjoyed following her on her journey to Ceylon and beyond, quite a trek for a young lady who has only ever known the windswept sights of Skara. Then there is Roz, rather a closed-up person, but what I liked most about her story was how she discovered her family history, things that she had no idea about, through letters and research.

I’m really looking forward to book 2 now, which follows the second sister, Lily. I feel I have a sense of each sister from this book but I’m excited to know where Lily ended up and the effect of the curse on her. The Sea Stone Sisters was easy to read but full of depth, portraying the few options available to young ladies a century ago. I loved the details of Skara and its wild and ethereal beauty, along with the legend which originated thousands of years earlier. All in all, this story is magical in more ways than one, delightful and well-rounded in its own right but setting the scene for what is to come. I loved it.

After many years of travelling the world, Eleanor Buchanan has turned her hand to a brand-new series of enthralling stories that combine her passion for travel, her belief in the power of evocative love stories and her enduring fascination with the relationship between the past and the present. Now based in York, she still searches for wide horizons whenever she can.