REVIEW: Never Stop Believing

Review by Aileen Murphy

NOVEL: When We Believed in Mermaids (2019) by Barbara O’Neal

Kit Bianci is hard at work as an doctor in the emergency department of a hospital in Santa Cruz when live coverage of a fire engulfing a nightclub in New Zealand appears on the television.

Out of the corner of her eye Kit notices a woman stumbling through the smoke and debris, her resemblance to Kit’s sister Josie is uncanny. However it couldn’t possible be Josie as she was killed in a terrorist attack on a train while travelling in France 15 years earlier.

Kit shakes off what she has seen blaming her exhausted brain, but the resemblance to Josie is so strong that even Kit’s mother is shaken by it and persuades Kit to go to New Zealand to search for her dead sister. And so Kit heads off on a journey across the world where she discovers not only a life-time of information about sister, but also a great deal about herself and the fears and insecurities which have been holding her back in her adult life.

There are a number of stories at work in the book which flips between Kit and Josie’s bohemian upbringing, which included a lost teenage boy who turned up out of nowhere one day and became part of their family. Then there’s the difficult relationship Kit and Josie had with their parents when they were children, the complex ones Josie has with her own family as a grown-up, and the relationships Kit has squandered as shadows of her past haunt her.

When We Believed in Mermaids is an engaging and unique tale set in a stunningly brought to life Auckland. A solid read throughout, you’ll be fully engaged to the end to see if the two sisters can reunite or will the secrets of their past keep  them apart forever.