Three Sisters by Heather Morris

Three Sisters by Heather Morris is the 3rd and final book of The Tattooist of Auschwitz series. I read the other 2 and liked them very much. I was excited to read this one and review it today, on Holocaust Memorial Day, marking 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. I loved the first 2 books, but this one was not as good, unfortunately. I gave it 4 stars and I say at the end of the review why.

This is a story based on real events, just like the previous 2 books in the series were. It tells the story of the fictionalised life of the 3 sisters who survived Auschwitz. Cibi, Magda, and Livi were born and raised in a town in Slovakia. They were all teenagers when they were taken. Livi, the youngest was ordered to leave her home, was only 15. Her older sister Cibi followed her, despite that she was 19 herself. Madga, aged 17, managed to avoid being sent to the camps for a while, but she ends up at Auschwitz too, where the sisters are reunited.
The novel tells their story before going into the camps, while they were at Auschwitz, and their lives after the liberation. I liked that and the story needs to be told.

Unlike the other 2 books in the series, this one deals with teenagers and this is where the problems start. Morris wrote a few times that the family refers to the youngest as a “baby”. That seems a bit of a stretch for the 1940s. The tone is more suitable for a modern story, where teenagers are infantilised by their families. I was also annoyed that, at page 147, a girl in Auschwitz mentions antibiotics and that garlic is similar to it. Historical fiction are as good as their research. Someone who wrote multiple books on the 1940s should have known that 2 main antibiotics were discovered just before WW2 and they were starting to be used on a wide scale in the early 1940s. It’s very unlikely that a girl from a town would be so familiar with antibiotics, in June 1943, after spending over a year in a death camp.
At page 302, one of them said thinking of something as “a part of her DNA”. That event was supposed to take place in 1946, which is about 40 years before DNA was common knowledge. That’s just poor writing and poor editing.
I recommend the book, but it is not a 5 stars book. The dialogues and the storyline is not as good as the first two, which is such a shame.

Three Sisters by Heather Morris

Details about the picture: –
My rating: 4/5 Stars
Would I recommend it: yes
Published by: Zaffre
Year it was published: 2021
Format: e-book
Genre(s): Fiction
Pages: 426

About the author: Heather Morris was born in New Zealand and she now leaves in Australia. In 1995 Morris began work in the Social Work Department at Monash Medical Centre in Melbourne where she stayed until 2017. She wrote screenplays for years, taking a scriptwriting course, attending seminars in Australia and US.
In 2003 she was introduced to Lale Sokolov, an elderly gentleman “who might just have a story worth telling”. The Tattooist was intended to be a screenplay and went into competitions with it. She was inspired from competition readers to publish Lale’s story as a book. She went on to raise funds on a Kickstarter campaign, so she could publish her story as a novel. She continued with another book, about Cilka, a woman who helped Lale.
Books by her: The Tattooist of Auschwitz and Cilka’s journey.
Website & Social Media Links: heathermorris