The Weird Sisters [Large Print] [Hardcover]

"We became home because we were failures," begins The Weird Sisters and that quote only really made sense to me once I'd completed the book, but it's a wonderful quote even before I knew what it meant. I liked how the Prologue set the novel up. It's only short, maybe a page and a half but it sets the story up. We learn about the girls' dad, who is a Shakespeare professor and we learn their mother is ill, which leads to them all coming home. We see where the girls are currently living; Cordy is travelling, Bean is in New York and Rose is living with her fiance Jonathan as they prepare for the journey back to Barney, back to where they grew up. Rose is a homebody, so coming home for her isn't an issue, in fact it's what she lives for whereas the opposite is true for Cordy and Bean. They hate being in such a small town.

What makes The Weird Sisters unique (to me, at least; I'm sure there are many novels that feature William Shakespeare but this is the first I've read) is the Shakespeare factor. The Andreas family are voracious readers and their dad is a Shakespeare professor, so it rather goes without saying that the girls lives are very much soaked into Shakespeare. They're named after Shakespeare's characters: Cordelia, Rosalind, Bianca. The title of the novel comes from Shakespeare and the girls and their dad consistently quote sentences written by the bard himself. Now comes the difficult part. For me. My knowledge of Shakespeare is shaky. I know he wrote Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet amongst others. I know he's revered. But I've never read a piece of Shakespeare's work so I truly thought the amount of Shakespeare in the novel would put me off, but it didn't. Sure, some of the quotes made me scratch my head (metaphorically speaking) but for the most part I could get the general jist of them.

I found the sisters fascinating. Usually in novels sisters are as close as anything, but not Rose, Cordy and Bean. They might look alike, have some of the same mannerisms and be brilliantly stubborn but they're not close, not even a little bit. Rose is the eldest, the sensible one, planning a wedding to Jonathan, whom she met at the school where she teaches. Cordy's the youngest, the baby of the family, who's known for her wanderlust and her inability to stay in one place for any stretch of time. Then there's Bean, the middle sister, the black sheep of the family who doesn't know her place. Isn't as sensible as Rose, isn't as delicate as Cordy and who's trying to find exactly what it is that's her talent, the thing that makes her stand out. I found them each to be maddening in some areas but wonderful in others and I liked how they were all forced to interact with each other when they came home to look after their sick mother.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Weird Sisters, Shakespeare and all. I do wonder how much of the story itself is perhaps inspired by a Shakespeare play, so if anyone knows I'd love to know if it is, because I have no idea. It's a very sensitive novel and I never felt as if Eleanor Brown put one sister ahead of the other. All three had secrets and wants and desires of their own and I felt happy to be in their company. It took my five days or so to read the novel and I was thrilled to climb into bed each night to devour more of the novel. I started the book with no pre-conceived notions, not really, and left it feeling happy to have known Cordy, Bean, Rose and their parents. I did find the writing style strange - I have since found out it's first-person-plural narrative. Not that I can explain what it is; it wasn't jarring or anything, in fact I found it fascinating, I just couldn't get my head around it because I've never read prose like it before. I'll be on the lookout for a second novel from Eleanor, I thoroughly enjoyed this one and would definitely recommend it, it was a wonderful book.

The description made it sound like a novel version of the very novelistic film The Royal Tenenbaums. It shares the same basic plot of disappointed or failed grown children moving back home, and has a sick parent. The variation of them all being sisters was interesting as relationships between women are generally more complex than it is between men.

I really enjoyed the novel. It's one of those books that creates a little hermetic world of its own that is very pleasant to immerse yourself in. It's not quirky, or set in a strange, slightly left of reality world; more that it's set in a small out the way place where everyone knows everyone so there is a friendliness and an ease between people.

One doubt I had was the Shakespeare quotes. I was half expecting whole chapters to be swallowed up with essays about Shakespeare in a pretentious attempt at connecting his plays to the story. Luckily it wasn't a big part of the book. Instead they simply quote short snippets from time to time amidst normal conversation. The connection between the quote and the content of the conversation can be easily seen. At a very rough guess I would say there are about forty quotes in a long book. You can go a lot of pages before encountering another bit of Shakespeare. It was not pretentious, it was not irritating, it was not awkward; it was never crow-barred in and the novel never ground to a halt while the author paraded her knowledge.

The Shakespeare quotes are short, harmless and integrated organically into the book.

The book has an odd narrative voice. The three sisters are narrating the story together so the word "we" is used in unusual places. It isn't an issue as all it does is add an extra layer of oddness to the book.

As I was reading it I thought it was a four star book on merit alone, but that as it was so enjoyable I was going to give it five stars overall. Unfortunately I had some issues with the ending. The story ends as it should. It's hard to imagine how it could end differently. It's not like it would have been appropriate to drop a terrorist cell with a plan to blow up the library into the book just to give it a bold action climax. I simply felt the novel was rather anti-climactic.

The problem for me was that ending was so obvious from so early on. The story slid along frictionlessly on rails to its obvious destination without any deviation, complication or kink. For it to reach the end so safely and pretty much exactly as was expected was less than thrilling once you got to the end of the line. The book deserved better. A bit bigger drama, or a minor twist that altered the final outcome for the characters, would have been welcome. As it was, it just sort of tails off with a whimper.

I also found the end of chapter twenty, the climactic moment for the Rose character, to be a slog to read. It was an important section, but it annoyed and bored me, so I skipped a few important pages. I could easily work out the contents of those pages for myself without reading them. My problem was that it read like the author herself hated that bit, and had struggled for a long time, and failed, to get that section to work. It was bad writing on an obligatory but uninteresting section of the story.

Overall I really enjoyed the book. It's much more about character than it is about plot. The characters are solid and believable enough to my satisfaction. That the plot glides along so smoothly for so long without any major upset or unexpected deviation is far from a bad thing until towards the end. It's only then that it feels like it played too safe.

I estimate that it took me ten hours to read the book (six hours is the average length of a book).

I highly recommend it. For all my complaints, they are far from deal-breakers that wreck the novel. They are more like minor disappointments that don't truly matter overall. I really enjoyed it.

Meet the Andreas sisters: Rose (Rosalind), the eldest, who is sensible, practical and in charge of everyone and everything. Bean (Bianca), the glamorous middle one, who left their dull childhood home as fast as was possible and escaped to the bright lights of New York. And Cordy (Cordelia), the youngest: cute, guileless and laidback who has never really grown up.
The sisters have gone their separate ways and drifted apart since childhood, but their mother's illness draws them all back together, and they find themselves living under the same roof alongside one another for the first time in years. With each sister nursing a secret worry that she fears will make her appear vulnerable in front of the other two, it is an awkward, tense time - but maybe the sisters have more in common than at first they thought?
I enjoyed this novel very much. The characters of the sisters are distinct and thoughtfully drawn, and I found myself caring about their individual predicaments. The telling of their stories is beautifully done too, in a 'plural' rather than singular voice, so that they tell the tale in unison, with a 'we' voice rather than 'I'. It's not a perfect book - the epilogue felt disappointingly rushed (the ending of the mother's story felt particularly glossed over) and the constant quoting of Shakespeare got on my nerves very quickly - but overall, the novel felt fresh, quirky and it kept me engaged.