The Weird Sisters is the story of 3 girls named for prominent women in Shakespeare's plays because their father idolized the long dead bard. The only major problem with being named after, read plays, and taught all about these women your whole life is that there really is no living up to them. This is a fact that Rosalind (Rose), Bianca (Bean), and Cordelia (Cordy) long ago accepted. Something they cannot accept: that at the age of thirty they would all be back home, their lives horribly messed up, and helping their mother get through her fight with breast cancer. But deal they must and this book is the journey of their fight, not only with one another, but with their lives.
I picked this book up for much the same reason I pick up any book about sisters: being the oldest of three girls I can't help but be pulled to the complex stories of other women in the same family set. Well, if I was looking for someone to relate to I did not find it here. While my sisters and I are not bound at the hip, we have a much better relationship than the three who seem to hate each other and can be quite cruel to one another at the beginning of the novel. Yes they evolve and even come to cherish one another's company, but by the time this takes place I found myself tired of the novel. And not only did I find the relationships unrelatable I could not find likability in Rose's fear of change, her feelings of being the stand in mother, or her contempt for her younger sisters; nor in Bean's uncontrolable need to be loved (to the point of her own distruction) or Cordy's wonderlust and perpetual feelings of inadquecy. I am aware that most people have one or more of these character flaws (I am among the masses), but the author exagerates them to an unnecesary level in an effort to make their redeption more grand.
Along with this unbelievability factor we have the POV that just confusses me as the reader. At first I found the author's way of narrating from the POV of one of the sisters intriguing; I found myself trying to figure out which sister she was. But I soon realized it was not so simple. While the author uses words and phrases such as "we", "our parents", and "us", she uses it to talk about all of them, never taking on the POV of just one sister. For example:
"For some reason, Cordy had never redecorated the way Bean and Rose has as we grew older." (p82)
After I stopped trying to figure out if the author would stick with a character, and the confusion passed, I became annoyed. At times I was even distracted from the story by this.
All those points aside I must say that over all I enjoyed the book, I simply didn't fall in love with it. I did like the way things turned out for each of the women, it wasn't a perfect happy ending for each, not in my opinion at least, but a believable one.
I would recommend this book to any number of my friends. That being said I have decided to give my copy away in this week's giveaway. This is not because of my dislike for the novel, but instead to make room for those books that I am completely in love with. I can see myself rereading this book at some point when I can get a little more out of it, but not soon enough that I feel the need to keep it on my shelves. So if anyone would like it just leave me a message. I do believe that you will like it if you give it a chance. And so I leave you with a final quote from the book:
"She just smiled indulgently and said, 'Oh, honey, we're all fuckups in our own special ways,'" (p308).
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