Catherine Greer

Maybe I expected too much of this novel, puely because she shares a surname with Germaine, but I had such a difficult time trying to finish this. From about chapter 2 I was skimming and even then I just kept putting it down. The cover promised a trio of teenaged girls who wouldn’t implode. The innards kept telling me “Boys come, boys go, but sirens are friends forever”. But essentially this is the same story about teenaged girls’ intense friendships going awry that you’ve seen a hundred times in Hollywood movies.
Sporty Ash, who self harms, Malaysian-Australian Ruby, who has an eating disorder, and Annie, the literary blonde, are beautiful, self-centred girls from Kirribilli, Sydney, who live in houses with “servants quarters” and have been thrown together since infancy by their stage mothers as the singing trio, The Sirens. When Ash’s charming stepbrother, Trip, arrives from Canada in the wake of arson charges, all of their lives are set to change.
I might have put more effort into reading this book I couldn’t stand these characters. I don’t think I’m meant to view Annie, the narrator, as a power monger, but I just don’t want to spend time around someone who her continually judges of her family and friends, gives calculated compliments, and uses their flaws to aggrandise herself:
“I wonder what it would be like to be Ash, so pretty and so messed up…”
“I want to shake her and say she should stop being such a victim. But I don’t - of course I don’t – because I am such a good daughter. A good person… She is so weak and I can’t stop myself from hating her for it.”
A little empathy and tolerance would go along way to making me want to finish the book.
I bought this one for the title and the dripping pink rose on the cover, which I thought would attract readers in my library. And they will. This is a novel for Gossip Girl fans who will enjoy peering into the lives of the rich and not-so-famous, watching their lives crack and their friendships fragments in unexpected directions. These readers will relate to the beautiful clothes, superfluous selfies, and impromptu tattoos far less critically than me. And they will probably enjoy the way the narrator takes her friends’ mental health issues for granted and engage more fully with the suspense generated by having a potential arsonist around.… (meer)