Nocturnal Book Reviews

2.5/5
You know what? I was really looking forward to this book because a) I love Renaissance b) I enjoy reading book about powerful women in history, but unfortunately The Deadly Sisterhood failed to deliver coherent and strong stories despite the massive research the author so obviously undertook.

I've read a lot of biographies at some point in my life, and this one still comes to mind, because it absolutely blew me away.



Andre Maurois brought George Sand to life. She was a living, breathing woman to me, I fell in love with her and after that read everything I could find written by her. She was an astounding, powerful woman.

The Deadly Sisterhood reads like a dry recollection of many events with few interesting sparks in between. It's main failure is that it's disjointed - each woman's life is not a separate part of the book, - instead you just catch glimpses of them here and there among a huge mass of details, names and events dumped on us in between.

The second offense that made me struggle even more to engage in this book is that the recollection of events is not linear. The Deadly Sisterhood is separated into few time frames of Renaissance, that's true, but we are still jumping from past to present and back, and I think this could have been simply avoided by telling us about each woman separately. I think the effort to do so was there, but the author got buried under sheer amount of what happened, the interactions between the heroines of the book, their relatives and their husbands.

Regrettably I would not recommend this book, because I struggled to get through it. The only positive thing about my reading The Deadly Sisterhood was that it made me want to find out more about its formidable heroines.