Reviewed by Emma Crowley
Throughout her childhood, Mia has watched her beloved sisters leave their Tuscan villa and start their own families. Now it’s her turn and, having promised them that she will follow her heart, she hopes she will finally be brave enough fall in love herself…
Not long after she arrives in London, Mia meets Ben, a bookseller with warm hazel eyes and thick brown hair. As they spend more time together, Mia finds herself enchanted by his gentle smile. But just as she feels her affection for him growing, Ben tells her he can never leave London. Falling in love and building a life with him would mean saying goodbye to her home in the Tuscan hills forever.
As she thinks about her future, Mia finds a locket hidden in the house where she is staying, along with a long-forgotten love story that mirrors her own. As she uncovers diary entries from the eve of the First World War, she learns of a forbidden romance, and a woman who also once shared Mia’s desire to find her place in the world.
But will the story Mia unravels inspire her to keep her promise to embrace the future, and let Ben into her heart at last? Or will she return to Italy, leaving behind the only man she has ever truly loved?
Many thanks to Bookouture via NetGalley for my copy of The Tuscan Sister’s Promise to review and to Sharon for having my review on the blog.
The Tuscan Sister’s Promise is the third in the Tuscan Sisters series by Daniela Sacerdoti. It can easily be read as a standalone perhaps even more so than the previous two books as the setting is entirely new. Yes, there are a few paragraphs or conversations between characters filling in readers on what has already happened which serves as a handy refresher for those readers who have been with the sisters since the start but also helps new readers to become familiar with the various storylines. This proved to be a very quick read and the one thing I found about it was that the chapters were too short. I felt I was just getting into the chapter and then it was over. I found this quite unsettling at first and thought maybe it was just this way for the first introductory chapters, but the story continued in this vein. Once, I knew to expect short chapters I became more settled into the rhythm and pace of the book but still that urge for more within each chapter lingered.
Mia is the third sister to have her story told and she is the most magical of the sisters. She is deep and almost spiritual and art plays an enormous role in her life which is one of the significant themes throughout the book. Magic plays a dominant role throughout and usually I would scoff at this but here it worked very well and fitted in aptly with Mia’s personality and all that she was experiencing. The beginning of the book, which picked up where book two left off, sees Mia leaving Tuscany and the beautiful family home, Casalta with her mother Emmeline. They travel to London where Emmeline has lived for several years. For Mia this is an entirely new experience for she has never left the comfort of home before and the warm and supportive embrace of her sisters.
Mia is like a fish out of water as she attempts to settle into her new surroundings. Everything is so new and unknown to her as it’s the first time she is facing the big wide world. Terror, excitement, self-doubt but also determination fill her being and she finds things strange and over whelming. None more so when initially her passion for art and her ability to draw and paint deserts her. As she says in the book painting is the oxygen she breathes and without this she is nothing. She tries to paint but she feels empty as if her inspiration had remained in Tuscany. But what she does have is her gift as do her sisters. These are traits that manifest themselves in different ways for the sisters and are passed down from her mother’s side of the family. The sisters keep their gifts a secret from the world and Mia’s comes and goes. She has premonitions, dreams or indications of the future or what happened in the past. She can hear someone’s thoughts in her mind and with this knowledge she often paints what she has seen in her mind rather than blurt things out. But what will she do if this gift has deserted her especially as she has held it so precious and close to her heart and it has shaped the person she is today?
Meeting her mothers neighbour Georgia, Mia forms a friendship which is the catalyst that opens up further strands of the story. Her brother Neil buys and does up houses and a dream which Mia had had comes to fruition. Number 17 Persimmon Lane has recently been bought by Neil and although it is in a state of disrepair he offers Mia the conservatory to sue an art studio. Things are starting to fall into place for her and inspiration strikes once more fuelled by the discovery of a locket in the garden which contains a picture of a woman. A diary is subsequently found in the conservatory hidden away and naturally enough Mia starts reading it. I loved the chapters which featured extracts from the diary’s author Catherine. Going back in time to her life in the years just before the outbreak of World War One opened the historical aspect of the book which I had been longing to occur. Soon parallels started to manifest themselves between the lives of both Mia and Catherine although Mia’s was occurring in reverse to that of Catherine’s.
A chance meeting with a man in a local park makes a brief but deep impact on Mia and further discovering that Ben lives next door to her new studio turns things into a more positive experience for her in London. Reading through Catherine’s diary and things developing with Ben (at an alarmingly quick rate it must be said) make up the remainder of the book. Times are sent to test them with Emma, Ben’s sister experiencing trauma and difficulties in her life which in turn make things challenging for Mia and Ben. As nice as it was reading of all this and wondering what the outcome would be I was perhaps hoping for just that little bit more mystery of digging through the past to uncover something. Yes, there was a very small bit of this towards the end but it fell into place rather too easily and conveniently. I just wanted that little bit more to get stuck into. A few more twists and turns would have been great.
All in all this was a good read but the first book, the Tuscan Sister, still remains my favourite. At the end of book, I remember there being a real cliffhanger and I was dying to know what would happen next but there was no reference to it here at all. I’m hoping in the final book in the series which will tell Nora’s story (she is the sister who seems to be the most enigmatic of all) will provide me with the answer to that cliffhanger. Mia’s story will overall please readers despite the few minor opinions I had about certain things.
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