The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown

I have just got back from my monthly book group where our book of choice to discuss was The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown. So I thought I would get my book review done on the blog while still fresh and also add some views that came out of the book group tonight.




Plot:  Unlucky in work, love and life, the Andreas sisters return to their childhood home, ostensibly to care for their ailing mother. But each sister has a secret she's unwilling to share – each has come home to lick her own wounds. 


The Andreas family is an eccentric one. Books are their passion (a trip to the library usually solved everything), TV is something other families watched. Their father – a renowned, eccentric professor of Shakespeare who communicates almost exclusively in Shakespearean verse – named all three girls for great Shakespearean women – Rose (Rosalind), Bean (Bianca), and Cordy (Cordelia); as a result, the girls find that they have a lot to live up to.

With this burden, as well as others they shoulder, the Andreas sisters have a difficult time communicating with both their parents and their lovers, but especially with each other. Each sister has found her life nothing like she had thought it would be – and suddenly faced with their parents' frailty and their own disappointments and setbacks, their usual quick salve of a book suddenly can't solve what ails them. Can all three escape their archetypal roots and find happiness in a normal life? As it turns out, the small town of Barnwell and their sisterly bond offer much more than they ever expected.


I knew that myself and 'The Weird Sisters' were going to get along just fine when I opened the book to the first page and found myself confronted with a quote from my favourite Shakespeare play of all time. 'I dreamt last night of the three weird sisters.'


Shakespeare plays a principal role throughout the book as his words are used by each of the members of the Andreas family to convey their feelings during times of personal stress. Books and Shakespeare are the loves of the Andreas family and I found myself falling in love with them too as the story went on.


Being an only child I found the relationship between the three sisters endlessly fascinating, the way they could one minute be saying the cruellest things to each other and in a heartbeat be offering words of comfort like nothing had happened. Eleanor Brown manages to write each sister with such depth that you begin to know their character differences intimately and how they will react to any given situation. You become invested in their struggle to shake off the trappings of their Shakespearean namesakes and find themselves and the life they truly desire.


The use of Shakespearean quotes is inspired and Eleanor Brown should be applauded on the amount of research she must have done into Shakespeare's works in order to fill the book with such a high quantity of quotes which all seem to add something to the story and provide us with more insight into the characters' emotions. 


 I also loved the descriptions of their home town of Barnwell which painted such a vivid portrait in my mind of a small university town with the quaint library, student frequented coffee shop and homely church. I could have stepped inside the book and made myself right at home.


The scenes describing their mother's illness and her treatments are heartbreaking and difficult to read at times, but incredibly truthful. You find yourself willing this woman to get better as the book goes on and you see glimpses of her character but she is not as well rounded as the other characters in the story.


Within our book group I was the most enamoured with this book. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and was sad to leave these characters behind when it came to the end. The one thing I didn't enjoy so much was the narrative voice, meant to be the three sisters narrating as one separate entity. Although I can see it allowed for more scope and objectivity compared to a first person narrative, I found the concept a bit confusing and difficult to get into at first.


I would definitely recommend this book to anyone looking for a well written, engrossing story about family relationships and the trials we have to go through to find ourselves.