The Weird Sisters

It doesn't matter if you don't get the Shakespearian reference in the title of Eleanor Brown's book, The Weird Sisters, though you might spend some time thinking she's pretty harsh to call Rose, Bean, and Cordy Andreas particularly weird. The Shakespeare stuff only really rears its head when their father addresses his grown daughter because, yes, this scholar insists on speaking in the words of the Bard. Kind of an annoying construct, but even the girls realize this: Sometimes we had the overwhelming urge to grab our father by the shoulders and shake him until the meaning of his obtuse quotations fall from his mouth like loosened teeth. Let's just say that a little of this goes a long way. Fortunately he's not that chatty. The three sisters are the voice of the novel and Brown avoids showing favorites by writing in the third person plural. Not so much a royal we as an effacing, collective we; like the Fates who use the same eyeball to see the future or like, yes, the original Weird Sisters who are disturbingly interchangeable in giving Macbeth a prophecy.

The book begins nicely with: We came home because we were failures. Rosemund, Bianca, and Cordelia have all retreated from their poor decisions and come home to roost, ostensibly to help care for their cancer-stricken mother. They use their home and the tiny academic mid-western town as a touchstone before (we assume) launching themselves back into the harsh world.

In spite of the "We", Brown does a great job of keeping the women straight, their personalities apparently match their Shakespearian namesakes, but I only knew King Lear's Cordelia well enough to test that. The cancer is a backdrop, as is the real world, but we do want these women to sort out their lives. They're not annoying in the way some dithering characters might be. It's not like I wanted to shake them by the shoulders. Will Rose dare to leave her comfortable life (and ailing mother) to join her fiance in England? Will Bean extricate herself from some destructive habits and hook up with the Episcopalian priest? Will Cordy grow up enough to become the mother she has to be (in less than 9 months)?

Okay, there's not a lot of doubt in how things will turn out, but Eleanor Brown makes the path interestingly spiky and twisted. Wouldn't we all want to be relaunched from the comfort of home when the going gets tough? Brown balances that secret desire with the reality that even Shakespeare occasionally made his characters commit to a decision. Remember, things didn't end well for Macbeth when he was "like the cat in the adage." (Act 1, scene 7). Even if the ending doesn't quite satisfy, it was nice to get to know these women and The Weird Sisters was just the fun read I needed.