Reviewed by Ambrea
After spending years consciously
avoiding Barnwell, their quiet Midwestern hometown, Bianca (curiously nicknamed
Bean by her family) and Cordelia (Cordy) Andreas have returned home and
rejoined their sister Rosalind (Rose) in caring for their ailing mother. But their family reunion is far from
happy: Bean, pregnant and uncertain of
her future, and Cordy, faced with criminal charges after embezzling money from
her former employer, are struggling to right their lives and take control—and
even responsible, dependable Rose isn’t above keeping her own secrets.
Faced with their mother’s growing
illness and their own shortcomings, Rose, Cordy, and Bean must learn to accept
the challenges and changes in their life to grow into the women they were meant
to be.
The
Weird Sisters is
a uniquely entertaining book that incorporates life, the good and the bad, into
a twisted tale of family and all the things that can be strange, go wrong, or
just drive a sibling crazy. Well-written
and fairly easy to read, Eleanor Brown’s novel is a pretty enjoyable story.
The one thing I never understood
about The Weird Sisters, however, was
the narrator. While I give her credit
for creating a unique narrator, I can't say it made the novel any better or
even made me appreciate the work more.
The narrator uses inclusive terms like “we” and “our,” which makes this
anonymous, omniscient being sound like one of the sisters.
But the narrator obviously isn’t.
Despite seeming to manifest as
one of the sisters, the narrator remains decidedly separate, located within the
sisters’ midst but simultaneously not, almost like a collective consciousness
that is all and none at the same time.
It’s an unconventional vehicle for the story and I will say it’s
interesting, but, more often, I found it a confusing literary tic because I was
immediately flummoxed by the narrator and his/her/its relationship to the
Andreas sisters. Honestly, it left me
pondering over exactly who or what is telling the story, looking back to see what
tidbit of information I missed.
(Note: there was an earlier review of The Weird Sisters here.)
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