BlogHer Book Club Review: The Weird Sisters

Of the four books I’ve read for BlogHer’s Book Club, Eleanor Brown’s The Weird Sisters is my absolute favorite.  (You can read all my book club reviews here.)

From the first few pages, I was captivated by this book.  It’s both humorous and tragic, intense and lighthearted.  I identified with the three main characters (a huge plus for me in any book), and found myself enjoying and savoring every page.  For a reader who tends to rush through and skim pages, this is a sign of a very good book.

The Weird Sisters tells the story of three sisters, Rosalind, Bianca, and Cordelia – all named by their Shakespearean professor father – who were never particular close, but due to a set of unfortunate life circumstances find themselves all back at home living with their parents in the small college town where they grew up.

The book is written in first person plural, which I had never seen before.  I read about it in a review before I started reading the book and was surprised to find how much I enjoyed the style and how well it fit the story.  It’s as if the three sisters are sitting down, telling you the story.  You never know who the speaker is; it could be one sister, it could be two, it could be all three.  For me, the style really made the book.  It felt more personal and I feel as though I truly got to know the sisters.

The title of the book, The Weird Sisters, is taken from Macbeth (of which I am an accidental and unappreciative expert due to a college literature class where the only reading material was 6 different versions of the play).  In Macbeth, although the “weird sisters” are witches, the term “weird” is not used as we use the word, but instead means fate or destiny.  The witches in Macbeth predicted the fateful events which took place in the tragedy, and the sisters in Brown’s book were brought back together and into their new lives through fate.

And so ends your literature lesson for today. 🙂

This is a coming-of-age book.  But what makes it so interesting is that these women are not coming of age as teens, but as adult women.  All three lived the lives they thought they wanted or were supposed to be living, but when the fates shifted and they all found themselves together again, they are forced to reconsider what they had be doing and make decisions to move forward.  So they grow up.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and based on a few comments that I got on Sunday and Monday‘s blog posts, some of you are enjoying it or think you might like to read it.

I received a copy of the book and compensation from BlogHer, but all opinions in this post are mine.