The four Latimer sisters are famous throughout New South Wales for their beauty, wit, ambition and sisterly love. They thought that would never change.
But then they left home to train as nurses, swapping the feather beds of their father's townhouse for the spartan bunks of nursing accommodation. And now, as the Depression casts its shadow across Australia, they must confront their own secret desires as the world changes around them. Will the sisters find the independence they crave? Or is life - like love - always bittersweet?
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(@HoZ_Books, 1 November 2013, ebook, 385 pages, borrowed from @GlasgowLib via @OverDriveLibs, # popsugarreadingchallenge, book with an oxymoron in the title)
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Bittersweet started off well and I thought I was onto a winner. Sadly, my enjoyment didn't last more than a few chapters before the book descended into trashy nonsense. I've read very little of the author's fiction but I expected better than this from an author so well-known and renowned. I know exactly when my enjoyment wavered, when Grace marries a man she meets and instantly falls in love with and the other characters spend many chapters dissing her marriage and her ineptness at housework and dealing with money. Grace is so inept because her mother spend her whole life mollycoddling and babying her and the attitude of her sister's comes across as quite cruel. Things go downhill from that moment. I had to force myself to finish the book.