Finding Home

About a year ago I was browsing 'goodreads.com' and ran across a book called "The Weird Sisters" written by Eleanor Brown and published by Berkley Publishing Group in 2011. The description caught my eye it was a story about a family that loved to read. A book about book lovers? How could I resist? However it was a hardback which I try not to buy unless I know the author so I waited. After I had been at Barnes & Noble a couple months it came out in paperback with the ISBN 9780425244142. What with my employee discount I decided to take the plunge and buy it. So I did. I was finishing up a book at the time so I didn't start right away but I was really looking forward to it. I just finished it two days ago and felt I should review it while it was still fresh in my mind.

First I want to say that I don't really know if I liked it or disliked it more. I thought it was ok but I kept reading all the way through, and while I read I was engrossed. Consequently this review may be a little all over the place. This is the story of the 'Weird' sisters. Not weird as in strange the way we use it but as in wyrd the way Shakespeare meant it to describe the witches in "Macbeth," meaning fate. They are the three Andreas sisters Rosalind, called Rose, the eldest named after the heroine in "As You Like It," Bianca, called Bean named for Bianca in "The Taming of the Shrew," and Cordelia, called Cordy from "King Lear." The book is written in first person plural which I really didn't like, it was annoying. Anyway Rose has never left home, never left their parents's side, Bean has flown the coop and moved to New York but has fallen on hard times and made her way back, and Cordy who is a wanderer by nature finds herself in need of a place to crash. When they learn that their mother has breast cancer they all move back home. 

Their father who is a Shakespearian professor is literally lost in Shakespeare's world and usually gives his advice in the forms of quotes from Shakespeare's plays. Their mother is usually so flighty that in the middle of cooking dinner she'll walk away from it to finish a book and forget about it until the smoke alarm goes off. Rose loves this absent-mindedness of her parents because this means that she gets to take control. This is what she lives for being in control, keeping everyone safe and all things in order. Bean who is the middle child is always the center of attention. Knows just how to flip her hair to get a guy to buy her a drink and knows exactly which shoes to buy to stay in style. But as her life in New York rapidly falls apart she finds that she doesn't quite have everything as figured out as she thought. Cordy who has always been the baby always taken care of seemingly gets away with anything. Her life is on the road town after town and more often then not man after man. When she finds herself pregnant and alone and knowing that her mother has cancer she heads home to be taken care of once more. 

I didn't like any of the sisters because they were all whinny and obnoxious. They didn't like each other very much and didn't really have any redeeming qualities. The first person plural was really pretty annoying and I felt that it fell in and out. I liked that the family enjoyed reading but the author ended up using pretty obscure refrences and quoting Shakespeare in such away that one has to be extremely knowledgable in his plays to understand. Which I feel would make it difficult for the average reader to appreciate. However the book was intricate and it kept me engrossed long enough that I finished reading the whole thing. But I really didn't like it, like it. I hated the sisters a lot and it's very difficult to truly enjoy the book when the characters rub me the wrong way. 

This is a hard book for me to recommend or not recommend because I didn't like a lot of the aspects of the book but I enjoyed the literary aspects of it. I think that Eleanor Brown had an ok idea to begin with but somehow in the writing she got jumbled and lost her way. I feel that this was an ok attempt and, depending on which voice she uses, I might even try her next book. I'm very lukewarm about the book, it's hard to describe how I feel about it because I can't really tell myself. Maybe a strange pick to review but I was hoping that I would clarify how I felt by writing this. All well I will just close this by saying that I don't really recommend it but I won't discourage anyone from buying it. Talk about indecisive. I guess this review will serve mainly as information about the book and some of you may decide to go out and buy it and some may decide to ignore the thing all together. Either way there is wide world of books out there and this is just one of them to enjoy.