The Weird Sisters

The Weird Sisters is one of those novels that you think about a lot while you read it. The premise involves three sisters—Rose (Rosalinda), Bean (Bianca), and Cordy (Cordelia)—who move in with their parents because of their own various failures and problems. However, they all make the transition back to the nest under the guise of helping their mother who has just been diagnosed with breast cancer. The book doesn’t leave you in the time between when you are reading and when you are not. I found myself thinking about the novel throughout the day: Which sister was I the most like? Responsible, homebody Rose? Sneaky, party-girl Bean? Free, gypsy-esq Cordy? 

All of the girls move home with secrets—Rose is too afraid to leave her hometown and move to England with her fiancé, Johnathan. She uses the excuse of her mother’s cancer as a reason to move back in with her parents and avoid following Johnathan to his new, one-year job in London. Cordy is pregnant and returns to her parents’ house where she tries to keep her situation hidden. Bean has just been caught stealing from her job in New York. Penniless and indebted to her former employer, she trots back to Ohio.

This book isn’t heavily plot driven—most of the plot points are a bit predictable. However, the interesting part of the novel is watching how the three sisters grow as individuals and as a family. The nature of the novel constantly comes back to questions of identity: Is it possible to define yourself and your personality in a vacuum? Does your role in your family play a part in your self-definition?  For example, Bean is often left feeling self-conscious because she is neither the responsible Rose nor the loveable Cordy. Similarly, Cordy has always been the baby of the family and has a hard time seeing herself as an adult who is about to have her own child. The girls come to realize that they can be defined separately from their family while still having a connection to their roots. 

Brown also discusses the nature of hometowns—how they can be hard to leave and hard to come back to. The duality of hometowns is something that has always been a favorite topic of mine in my own writing, and I really admired Brown’s discussion of the subject. Each sister represents a stance on their hometown of Barney: Rose never wanted to leave. Bean moved somewhere else and made that her home. Cordy never wanted to have a home at all and lived a wanderer’s life. However, by the end of the book, the sisters’ views on hometowns/homes shift. At one point Cordy says, "We all want to become something better than Barney, but we won't" (313).

The together/separateness of the characters in the novel is mirrored by the point of view in which Brown writes. I have never read a book with this exact style. It is told in the first-person plural (think The Virgin Suicides), with the sentences focused around the sisters as the collective “we.” However, much of the book breaks away from the collective mentality and focuses on a specific sister with the third-person voice. The book will discuss just what Cordy is doing at the moment, for instance.

The book is aware of its own literary prowess. The characters often talk in lines of Shakespeare, because of the sisters’ father being a scholar on good ole Bill’s work. The Weird Sisters are a reference to Shakespeare’s witches in Macbeth and the girls are individually named after characters in various plays.

The Weird Sisters is great for two kinds of readers: those who enjoy a unique point-of view narration and literary allusions, and those who like stories about people going through changes and transitions. It’s a great read, and I highly recommend it.