Book 6 of The Seven Sisters Series
Electra is the youngest of the D’Aplièse sisters, as a teenager she moved to Paris and was discovered as a model. She has always known she was adopted like her sisters, and has never gotten along with CeCe. After their father’s death, all the sisters were given a letter from Pa Salt and coordinates of their birthplaces. Electra hasn’t given the letter or the coordinates another thought as she doesn’t believe in looking backwards, only to the future.
One night, after her ex tells her he’s getting married, she drowns her sorrows with a bottle of vodka and a handful of sleeping pills. Thankfully her assistant finds her in time, and it takes a few more weeks for Electra to admit she’s an addict and needs help. She goes to rehab where she meets a handsome lawyer called Miles. After rehab, she starts to look into her birth family and meets up with her grandmother Stella Jackson.
American Cecily Huntley-Morgan’s fiancé left her for another woman and she is both brokenhearted and mortified. Her godmother invites her to come stay with her in Kenya. On the way to Africa, Cecily stops at her mother’s friend Audrey’s home in England. Audrey’s nephew seduces her, and she finds out that he is a cad as well.
In Kenya, Cecily is introduced to her godmother Kiki’s friends and one day when visiting the eccentric Alice, she meets a woman her own age: Katherine. When Cecily learns she is pregnant by the English aristocrat, a farmer comes to her rescue and asks her to marry him. Bill Forsyth, an Englishman as well, and Cecily marry, and one day when Bill is away, Cecily is taken into hospital with preeclampsia…
I really didn’t like the enfant terrible of the D’Aplièse family: she’s rude to people, especially her family, she’s a party girl who drinks far too much and takes too many drugs. But once she kicks her habit, she seems to change into another person, under the tutelage of her grandmother, the great Black activist Stella Jackson (the adoptive daughter of Cecily Huntley-Morgan Forsyth), the lawyer Miles (who does a lot of pro bono work), and her assistant who is a devout Muslim. I do really like her assistant, the girl can fix everything within seconds… we all need an assistant like that!
Cecily is a likeable character, for an American woman in the 1940s, she is very open minded and I like how she makes friends with her maid, the woman they hired to pretend Stella is her child – because back then a white couple couldn’t adopt a Black child. Cecily makes sure that Stella gets an education in the United States.
Read for the Read Between the Lines Reading Challenge 2026
Prompt 1: A Book Set in Africa
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️