Let me first apologize that this is the first post I've written in pretty much forever... FET's are boring. Me whining about being depressed is boring. Pretty much the only non-boring has been the fact that my last lupron shot was yesterday, and that I'm leaving for a trip to Colorado tomorrow... Woot! More on all that later. For now, I got to do my first book review for BlogHer! Quite exciting. So please bear with my- it's the first I've written since high school :)
This was a paid review for the BlogHer Book Club but all opinions expressed are my own.
The Weird Sisters, by Eleanor Brown, is the story of three sisters who return to their hometown under the pretense of nursing their ailing mother during her cancer treatments. While the sisters are not quite what you would call "close", they each share a love of reading and, to some degree, the college town they call home. Their father is an English Lit professor, devoting his career to the works of Shakespeare. As a result, he most often quotes plays rather than expressing thoughts of his own, a habit the sisters take to as well.
While the journey home is seemingly altruistic, each sister has a deeper, more self-centered motive for returning home. Rosalind, the eldest, is loath to follow her fiance to a post-doc in England. Bianca, the attention seeking middle child, has been fired from her position at a New York City law firm after her embezzlement was discovered. Cordelia, the youngest, has grown tired of her nomadic hippie lifestyle and has returned home to gestate her unplanned pregnancy.
Let's cut to the chase- I enjoyed the prose, an unusual first person plural (all three sisters share the first person point of view simultaneously). It made it feel as though the story was a look back in time, to a place where they all had significant troubles in their lives but could not trust each other enough to open up. At least yet. I did not, however, enjoy the rest of the book. I pretty much wanted to smack Bianca in the face for whining about how she was going to pay back her NYC law firm, while lusting after the town priest and seducing a professor into cheating on his wife with her. Not. Sympathetic. At. All. And don't get me started on Cordelia- who never seems to care enough to let the father of her child know that it exists. Oh! And better, she wants to keep the child to have something that's all her own- sounds like once of those high school clubs, to me. Rose was ok, but I kindof wanted to shake her hard and make her be her own person for once.
Overall, this one was just not my cup of tea. I don't have sisters, so i couldn't relate to the relationships between them. I don't know a whole lot of Shakespeare, so I was just annoyed at what came off as pretentious overuse of literary quotes.
I really wanted to like the book. I just didn't have it in me.
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That sounds quite annoying. I'll stick to re-reading The Hunger Games before the movie comes out next month. Glad to see you again!
ReplyDeleteCould definitely see how that book would not be the most enjoyable thing to read between a failed IVF and FET! I was reading Hunger Games during my IVF and got about 50 pages into the third book when we got out BFN. I can't finish the series now because it all just makes me think about IVF! Doesn't that suck?
ReplyDeleteIn other news, according to your calendar you are transferring TOMORROW!! That means you better get your butt in gear and give an update. :-)
Thinking of you and praying this is it. It has to be, right? Xoxo.
THE WEIRD SISTERS is about the "clash" of three sisters when they return to their parents' home in a small college town to not only be there for their cancer-striken mother, but because circumstances in their own individual lives led them to this point of "starting over." Their father is a HUGE fan of Shakespeare, named the three girls after Shakespeare characters, and often recites quotations from the bard. His daughters picked up on this trait growing up and so now they, too, quote Shakespeare. Many of the lines are quotations you probably don't remember reading in your British Lit class, but the author must have done some extensive research (or is a HUGE fan herself) to include the proper quote at the right moment in the novel.
ReplyDeleteYes, I read the book and know what the plot is about. I just didn't like it. I appreciate your summary though- seems pretty accurate.
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