The Weird Sisters

Book: The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown
Finished: February 2011
Pages: 336 ( I read mine on my Kindle)
Challenges:
** Amy Einhorn Perpetual ** A-Z 2011** Just For Fun**






From Amazon:
The Weird Sisters in Eleanor Brown's delightful debut could have been weirder, considering their upbringing. Their professor father spoke primarily in Shakespearean verse, and while other kids in the bucolic Midwestern college town of Barnwell checked the TV lineup, the Andreas girls lined up their library books. They buried themselves in books so completely that while they loved each other, they never learned to like each other much. And when adulthood arrived and they pursued separate destinies, each felt out of step with the world. When news of their mother's cancer makes a terribly convenient excuse for attention-hog Bean (Bianca) and Cordy (Cordelia), the “baby” who always got off easy, to boomerang back to Barnwell from New York and New Mexico, respectively, they return bearing the guilt (and consequences) of embezzlement and pregnancy-by-random-painter. They're most terrified of admitting these failures to Rose (Rosalind), the responsible eldest, who stayed in Barnwell to teach Math and cling to her caretaker-martyr role. With lively dialogue and witty collective narration, the sisters' untangling of their identities and relationships feels honest and wise, and the questions they raise about how we carry our childhood roles into our adult lives will resonate with all readers, especially those with their own weird sisters.

From Me:
Well.
I have heard that this book has gotten some mixed reviews, but I am going to throw my hat into the camp of the positive! I loved this book and I connected with it on a very personal level.


I could relate to the relationship the sisters had with one another--that is not to say that I necessarily liked all 3 of the sisters, and I was glad to see some redemption in all of the them by the end of the book. Really this is a testament to the idea that people can change--and do change- and can change for the better.

Most of importantly though, it made me really think about my own family.
I am a sister.
I only have one sister (no brothers) so there are only the two of us. I have always dreamed of having one of those loving , mushy gushy, Hallmark, do everything together kind of relationship with my sister, but it isn't there. We truly are more like the thorny Weird Sisters. And to be honest, there have been plenty of times that Kelly and I have not liked each other much. We could probably spend hours and thousands of dollars sitting on an analyst's couch to sort through our relationship but I have come to some conclusions all by myself. We are so totally opposite of each other, and there is so much bad history from our early young adult/ young married/ having children phase of our lives-- that is really, now, so much water under the bridge. To say the least, our relationship is thorny, but as we are aging, it is getting better. We will probably never have one of those dream relationships, But now? I know that we will be there for each other in times of trouble--just like those Weird Sisters. At the end of the day, there will come a time when both of our parents are gone, and we will be all that is left of our small little family.


This little gem was written in the third person plural, which felt strange at first, but was ultimately effective in portraying the lasting connection the 3 had with each other. The Shakespeare quotes were confusing just a few times, the Bard and I don't have a great relationship, but I did "get"most of them, and was pleased that there seemed to be just a nice amount of those quotes peppered throughout.

I marked a few passages as I read (a new skill I learned on my Kindle!)--

1. On sisterhood:

{Would we all have chosen to come back, knowing that it would be the three of us again, that all those secrets squeezed into one house would be impossible to keep? the answer is irrelevant--it was some kind of sick fate. We were destined to be sisters at birth, and apparently we were destined to be sisters now, when we thought we had put all that behind us.}

2. This made me smile--as a mother of 4, the battle over "the hump" has occurred many times. And even though Sam is the biggest of my 4 boys, because he is the youngest, he still gets stuck on the hump on those occasions all 3 boys are in my car.

{Rose and Cordy stood by the door for a moment and stared at each other expectantly, until Cordy rolled her eyes and climbed into the middle...."I haven't been the smallest for a long time," Cordy complained as we squeezed in on either side. "You're still the youngest," Bean said....}

3. I strove to install this preparedness for any kind of waiting in my own children, and fits me, personally to a tee. I always have a book (and Kindle) with me!

{On this road trip to our mother's date with breastiny (tm Cordy), we had all brought books, of course, no one in our family would ever think of being without reading material...}

4. All I could think here was, "oh, how true".

{ Rose and Bean looked at her as though she were a noxious substance we had just stepped in. The was a look best performed as a duet, and Cordy cringed just as she had the million times we had delivered it in concert before. How was it possible, all these years and experiences later, that no one could wound us like the others?}

5. Sisters--or really in the case of all combinations of siblings

{But it is worth noting, especially now that "weird" has evolved from its delicious original meaning of supernatural strangeness into something depressingly critical and pedestrian...Shakespeare didn't really mean the sisters were weird at all. The word he originally used was much closer to "wyrd" and that has an entirely different meaning. "Wyrd" means fate. And we might argue that we are not fated to do anything, that we have chosen everything in our lives, that there is no such thing as destiny. And we would be lying. Rose first, Bean never first, Cordy always. And if we don't accept it, don't see, like Shakespeare's Weird Sisters did, that we cannot fight our family and cannot fight our fates, well, whose failing is that but our own? Our destiny is in the way we were born, in the way we were raised, in the sum of the three of us.}

6. An arrow to my heart--

{We see stories in magazines or newspapers sometimes, or read novels about the deep and loving relationships between sisters. Sisters are supposed to be tight and connected, sharing family history and lore, laughing over misadventures. But we are not that way. We never have been, really, because even our partnering was more for spite than for love. Who are these sisters who act like this, who treat each other as their best friends? We have never met them. We know plenty of sisters who get along well, certainly, but wherefore the myth? }

This book helped me look at my relationship with my sister in new eyes. With renewed hope that we can and are changing things with each other as we age, that it is ok not to have that "magazine Hallmark-ish" kind of relationship. We have a shared history and memories, and not all of them are bad. We are who we are as individuals, but we are finding a way to come together again as family. Yes, there is hope that we will become friends.....





(note: books for the Just For Fun challenge aren't supposed to be cross-overed to other challenges, but I figure, I found this book on other blogs and I would have read it for fun even if it wasn't part of the Amy Einhorn imprint. The same goes fro the A-Z challenge. I didn't pick this book specifically for my "W" book, but hey, it works there! )