Sunday, April 15, 2012

The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown

A little bit "chick lit" but an easy and entertaining read.  The title is a reference to the three witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth and the story is that of three sisters, daughters of a renowned Shakespeare professor who communicates almost exclusively in verse lifted from Shakespeare (sometimes literally photocopies of pages highlighted to deliver a particular message).  The girls are all named after Shakespeare characters, Rosalind, Bianca and Cordelia, and seem to need to live up to those names.  The eldest feels responsible for the family and has never moved from their small Ohio college town.  She is now faced with the problem of her fiancé's being offered a two year job at Oxford just while her mother is being treated for breast cancer.  The middle sister fled to New York and lived beyond her means so must now return home deeply in debt and embarrassed by her past.  The youngest has wandered the country for years, never settling anywhere and returns home with a secret of her own.  The sisters must figure out how to relate to their parents and each other now that they are adults and, in particular, how to reveal their problems to their family in order to get the support (and closure) they need.  The writing style is also interesting - it weaves back and forth from giving the perspective of one of the three sisters to broadening it to the perspective of all three on the same event.

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