Storm Sister — Anna Landvik Deserves Her Own Novel

Denise was out at her book club Saturday — they're reading Colleen Hoover, God help them — and I had the apartment to myself with nearly twenty hours of Norwegian saga to burn through. I made coffee, opened the curtains to a gray Chicago lakefront, and let Hattie Morahan take me to fjords I'll never visit on a teacher's salary.

Here's the thing about Lucinda Riley's Seven Sisters series: it's doing something structurally that I find genuinely interesting, even if my grad school self would've been too snobby to admit it. Each book pairs a modern-day adopted sister with a historical ancestor, and in Storm Sister, that dual timeline is the whole game. Ally D'Aplièse — yacht racer, recently bereaved, newly in love — traces her origins to 1870s Norway and a singer named Anna Landvik who performed in the premiere of Grieg's Peer Gynt.

Now. Let's talk about what the author is really saying with that structure.

Where Ibsen Meets Beach Read

The historical Anna sections are where Riley's ambition actually matches her execution. Anna Landvik's story — a poor girl from rural Norway discovered for her voice, thrust into Christiania's music scene, tangled up with Edvard Grieg himself — has genuine momentum. Riley clearly did her homework. The details about the 1876 premiere of Peer Gynt, the political tensions in pre-independence Norway, the class dynamics that determine whether a woman gets to sing or gets to serve... this stuff works. It has weight. If you loved The Distant Hours or similar historical fiction built around artistic women fighting for space in a world that wants them quiet, this is its spiritual successor.

The modern timeline with Ally? Less so. And I say this as someone who was genuinely invested in her grief over Pa Salt and her romance with a sailor named Theo. The problem isn't Ally herself — she's capable, she's mourning, she's searching. The problem is Theo, who several listeners have rightly flagged as uncomfortably possessive. His "I know what's best for you" energy is played as passionate romance, and... look, I teach teenagers. I spend a lot of time helping seventeen-year-olds identify controlling behavior in literature. Theo sets off those alarms. Riley may not have intended it that way, but the text doesn't do enough to challenge it. My students would hate this. I'm with them on this one.

Morahan Knows That Silence Is a Sentence

Hattie Morahan narrates this the way I wish more narrators would — with restraint that opens into emotion rather than leading with it. Her delivery during Ally's grief scenes doesn't reach for tears. She lets the prose do the heaving and provides the steadiness underneath. Smart choice for a book this long. If she'd gone full theatrical for twenty hours, you'd be exhausted by hour six.

Her Norwegian characters are handled with care — not perfect accents, but consistent enough that you never lose track of who's speaking in the historical sections. And when Anna sings (or rather, when the text describes Anna singing), Morahan shifts into something almost reverent. The narrator understands that pause is punctuation. She gives the musical passages room to breathe, and for a book so tied to Grieg's compositions, that musical patience matters.

Where she's less distinctive is in the modern-day supporting cast. Ally's sisters blur together vocally, and since this is book two in a seven-book series, that's a lot of sisters to keep straight. But they're peripheral enough here that it didn't derail anything.

The Pacing Problem (Or: Why I Needed That Whole Saturday)

At nearly twenty hours, Storm Sister asks for real commitment. It doesn't always earn that time. The middle third — roughly hours seven through thirteen — drifts. Ally's investigation into her origins involves a lot of people explaining family trees, and while I appreciate genealogical detective work in theory, in practice it's someone reading letters and then another character summarizing what the letters said. This is why we still read the classics — Brontë would've burned through that setup in a chapter and a half.

But here's what kept me listening: Riley's structural trick of making you care about the historical story so much that you tolerate the modern framing to get back to it. Other listeners noticed the same dynamic in book one, and it holds here. Anna Landvik's story — her talent, her sacrifices, the men who both elevate and constrain her — is genuinely affecting. If Riley had written it as a standalone historical novel, I might've covered it on The Annotated Life. (My 47 listeners would've been thrilled. Okay, 46. Mom would've fallen asleep during the Grieg discussion.)

Who Gets the Most From This

If you loved the first Seven Sisters book and want more of the mythology, this delivers that and expands it. If you're drawn to historical fiction with a music angle — the way Riley weaves Grieg's actual biography into Anna's fictional life is the book's strongest trick — the historical sections alone justify the listen. If you're a 1.0x listener like me, block out a long weekend. The prose deserves to be savored in the Anna chapters, even if the modern sections could honestly handle 1.25x without losing much.

Skip it if controlling romantic leads are a dealbreaker for you. And if you need constant plot momentum, that sagging middle will test your patience.

Worth Pausing the Faculty Meeting For? Almost.

I wouldn't sneak this into Principal Martinez's next budget presentation — it demands too much attention for stealth listening, and the emotional beats in the historical timeline need your full brain. But on a quiet Saturday with good coffee and a sky gray enough to almost pass for Norwegian? Morahan's voice and Anna Landvik's story earned their twenty hours. Mostly. The modern timeline is the price of admission to a historical story that actually moved me. I've made worse trades. Riley was clearly building something sprawling with this series, and while the scaffolding shows, the rooms she's building are worth walking through.