The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown

My own weird sisters (and me)...Cordy, Bean, and Rose.
No wait, that's not right: Gwenda, Lynda and Cindy
(okay so isn't it weird that really
only my family calls me Gwenda AND
I felt the need to put that in my photo caption because I'm
with my sisters??) .

New book I love: The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown. Maybe I loved this book because it’s about three sisters and I’m one of three sisters. Maybe I loved this book because they’re Episcopalians and I’m an Episcopalian. Maybe it’s because this family defines itself by its love of literature and, well the Williamsons are a book family. When all other conversation fails, we seem to always come back to our favorite books. Oh, and that the setting is in a small college town and their lives seem to revolve around a higher education calendar. No, that doesn’t hit close to home or that caring for aging parents is part of the theme.


The Weird Sisters is now my favorite book of 2012. Written by Eleanor Brown, the Weird Sisters is a bewitching tale of three sisters who have grown up with a Shakespearian scholar father and a loving but distracted mother. The sisters each named for one of Shakespeare’s characters, now grown, have all returned to the family home ostensibly to care for their mother who has been diagnosed with breast cancer. In truth though, her illness is really a much needed excuse to escape from their own lives. Their return home is punctuated with saucy sarcasm and mysterious quotes from the Bard.

Like the Andreas sisters of The Weird Sisters, I also have strong feelings about having returned to my home town.  I often find myself apologizing for living in Lexington where I was born and raised. Sometimes I think my life should have been, somehow bigger, that I should have landed far from home and be living a glamorous life, riding the subway to work, sitting in a beach house somewhere writing my novel as I stare out over the waves with my dog’s head on my foot. And yet, I find myself here in the Bluegrass, living where I can step out my front door and hear my high school band practicing and my children are attending the same cotillions that I went to and have teachers with whom I once went to school. To me, it sounds small and yet, my life doesn’t feel that way. And even on the bad days when I’ve argued with someone or had a stressful day of real estate, it still feels big and rich and full of good things. To me, the landscape of horse farms and hills isn’t any less beautiful for my having seen it a thousand times before and the opportunity to make a difference in the world, here, is no less important than the difference I could make in another place. It’s really all about peace, isn’t it?  And, yet, I always have to clarify to people that I "chose" to move back home, that I "could" have lived somewhere else. 

The Weird Sisters isn’t The Life of Pi or even The Help in becoming a literary classic that defines an age or a culture but, I highly recommend it as a great read. If you ever had a sister, ever moved away from home, ever moved back home, ever read any Shakespeare or if you just like a really good book, put The Weird Sisters on your what to read next list. You might find, like I did, that it leaves you with a lot to ponder about growing up and where you fit into your family.

By the way, I was compensated for this review as part of BlogHer Book Club, however the opinions expressed are entirely my own. Just as they should and always will be…

Happy reading!