The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters interested me initially for its setting, India, as I'm continuing in my quest to read books with a variety of characters and stories.
So. The three Shergill sisters - eldest Rajni, a school principal in London; middle sister Jezmeen, an aspiring actress who has flitted from one bit role to another; and youngest Shirina who has recently married a wealthy Australian Sikh and decamped to Melbourne - are forced to make a pilgrimage to India to spread their mother's ashes. The pilgrimage has been planned almost to the moment, with the goal of bringing together three very different women. Unfortunately, the timing could not be worse, with all three women embarking on the trip in the midst of her own personal crisis.
Too, their mother's death has been fraught; the circumstances around her final days have divided the sisters as never before. Balli Kaur Jaswal has also taken pains to slowly unravel the secret and mysteries of their childhood, most critically the previous trip that then-16-year-old Rajni took to India with her mother, and which resulted in her mother never being able to return to India again.
At it's heart, The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters is about the bonds between family and the idea that even in families, there's much more below the surface than meets the eye. I enjoyed this story and Jaswal's writing. I sometimes felt the story lines were a bit too dragged out - I did tire of the hints, some subtle, some direct, about the previous debacle in India as well as Shirina's crisis. The story is excellent, but the story telling occasionally left something to be desired.
Three-and-a-half stars.
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