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Summary
Summary
Unabridged, 9 CDs, 11 hours
Read by TBA
A major new talent tackles the complicated terrain of sisters. A winsome novel that explores sibling rivalry, the power of books, and the places we decide to call home.
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Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
You don't have to have a sister or be a fan of the Bard to love Brown's bright, literate debut, but it wouldn't hurt. Sisters Rose (Rosalind; As You Like It), Bean (Bianca; The Taming of the Shrew), and Cordy (Cordelia; King Lear)--the book-loving, Shakespeare-quoting, and wonderfully screwed-up spawn of Bard scholar Dr. James Andreas--end up under one roof again in Barnwell, Ohio, the college town where they were raised, to help their breast cancera stricken mom. The real reasons they've trudged home, however, are far less straightforward: vagabond and youngest sib Cordy is pregnant with nowhere to go; man-eater Bean ran into big trouble in New York for embezzlement, and eldest sister Rose can't venture beyond the "mental circle with Barnwell at the center of it." For these pains-in-the-soul, the sisters have to learn to trust love--of themselves, of each other--to find their way home again. The supporting cast--removed, erudite dad; ailing mom; a crew of locals; Rose's long-suffering fiancé--is a punchy delight, but the stage clearly belongs to the sisters; Macbeth's witches would be proud of the toil and trouble they stir up. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Three sisters, a scholarly father who breaks into iambic pentameter, and an absentminded but loving mother who brought the girls up in rural Ohio may sound like an idyllic family; however, when Rosalind, Bianca, and Cordelia return home ostensibly to help their parents through their mother's cancer treatment readers begin to see a whole different family. A prologue introduces characters and hints of the dramas to come, while the omniscient narrator, seemingly the combined consciousness of the sisters, chronicles in the first-person plural events that occur during the heavy Ohio summer and end in the epilogue, which describes an (overly?) hopeful resolution. Brown writes with authority and affection both for her characters and the family hometown of Barnwell, a place that almost becomes another character in the story. A skillful use of flashback shows the characters developing and evolving as well as establishing the origins of family myth and specific personality traits. There are no false steps in this debut novel: the humor, lyricism, and realism characterizing this lovely book will appeal to fans of good modern fiction as well as stories of family and of the Midwest.--Loughran, Ellen Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE three siblings who jointly narrate Eleanor Brown's likable but sometimes careless first novel, "The Weird Sisters," seem incarnated from birth-order paradigms in a "Sociology of the Family" textbook. Rose, the oldest, is a faultfinding control freak. Bean, the middle sister, is a promiscuous attention seeker. Cordy, the youngest, simply refuses to grow up. Raised in the idyllic town of Barnwell, Ohio, daughters of loving if distracted parents (Dad lives, breathes and never stops quoting Shakespeare, which he teaches at the local college; Mom prepares delicious if unreliable meals and reads voraciously), the quarrelsome Andreas sisters, as full-grown women, have become self-reproaching, self-described "failures." When their mother is told she has breast cancer, they move back to their childhood home, avowedly out of concern but really in search of safe haven. For Rose, a professor of mathematics, the news of her mother's illness comes almost as a relief: "Thank God, a purpose. An excuse to be needed." It's also a good pretext for staying in Ohio, her comfort zone, rather than relocating to England, where her fiancé has been offered a visiting professorship at Oxford. For each of her two sisters - Cordy floating from place to place "like a dandelion seed," Bean living in New York, caring only about "clothes and designer martinis and how best to pick up and bed an investment banker" - the family emergency coincides with a personal crisis. Cordy has just learned that she's pregnant. (The father is a casual lover, already discarded.) Bean has been fired, though implausibly not arrested, for embezzling "a great deal of money" from the law firm where she has worked for several years. But despite a promising if shopworn premise and the perceptive ways Brown illustrates just how quickly a homecoming can turn three independent women back into "the girls," the ensuing plot seldom rises above the predictable and the romantic. Bean initiates a foolish affair with a much older married man, while resisting an attraction to the town's new Episcopal priest, a guy who wears "jeans and a Superman T-shirt" and who convinces her - haughty Bean with her designer clothes and perfect nails! - to volunteer with Habitat for Humanity. Cordy starts waitressing at the local coffee shop, whose scruffy and effusively sympathetic owner has had a crush on her since high school. Homebody Rose is persuaded, after much foot dragging, to spend a few days in England visiting her exasperated fiancé and discovers that it's possible to exist, even be happy, away from her family. Their mother's grave illness is given just enough attention (chemo, surgery, radiation, a life-threatening blood clot) to keep readers mindful of it, though never so much to distract us for too long from the sisters' fretful solipsism, which can sound like the overblown introduction to an old-time radio melodrama: "Would Bean always be chasing one man or another, Cordy eternally chasing some shadow of a person she might never become, and Rose herself chasing some shadow of the ways things were Supposed to Be?" You can almost hear the studio organ rumbling. First-person-plural point of view notwithstanding, there's a dated quality to Brown's novel (in which hair is likely to be called tresses, books tomes and bars watering holes; where people pad softly, blink back tears, bark laughs) and a striking absence of contemporary references. The Andreas family and the town of Barnwell appear to exist in a predigital world without terrorism, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a Great Recession, serious unemployment, even popular culture or politics of any kind. Frankly, I had difficulty figuring out if the story was supposed to be happening now, which I assume it is, or 10 years ago, or even 15. Again and again, flashbacks and back story are highly unlikely or flat-out wrong. Would a woman who is 33 in 2010 or '11 have bought a new 45-r.p.m. record when she was 16 - in 1993 or '94? It's doubtful that someone born around 1980 would have calculated as a girl how old she'd be at the millennium and then reckon 20 as being "ancient." Or that a middle-American small-town woman married in the late 1970s would have chosen to wear an "oh-so-60s Empire-waisted minidress" at her church wedding. And from experience, I can attest it's untrue that "men were not typically present in the delivery room" in 1977 or '78. HISTORICAL time is fudged, generalized, while quotidian details, those small things that lend nuance, are kept vague. Cordy, we're told, has spent seven years following rock bands, yet not one is named (Phish maybe?), nor do we ever see her listening to music or playing the guitar she has lugged back home with her. The sisters are almost never without a book in hand, but we're rarely told just what they're reading. Dan Brown or Jennifer Egan? "Under the Dome" or "The House of Mirth"? Knowing would make a difference. Not knowing does too. Which is a shame, because "The Weird Sisters" can be entertaining, and Eleanor Brown's neurotic, floundering characters have the potential to be spirited company. But their world is one you can never entirely believe in. You can live inside it comfortably, listening and watching, with your attention never wandering - but with your eyes sometimes, unpreventably, rolling. Tom De Haven is a novelist and a professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Library Journal Review
Sibling love and sibling rivalry are the keys to Brown's (www.eleanor-brown.com) debut novel, which revolves around three sisters each named after a Shakespearean character-Rose (Rosalind), Bean (-Bianca), and Cordy (Cordelia)-who simultaneously return to their childhood home, ostensibly to care for their ailing mother. While there is some predictability, the characters are complex enough to give the novel depth. Brown employs multiple narrative methods to tell each woman's story, sliding in and out of the third and first person with admirable skill. Actress/narrator Kirsten Potter controls these shifts well and brings the town and people of Barnwell to life. An entertaining book recommended for all fiction lovers. [The Amy Einhorn: Penguin hc was recommended for "Shakespeare lovers, bibliophiles, fans of novels in academic settings, and stories of sisterhood," LJ 10/1/10.-Ed.]-Joyce Kessel, Villa Maria Coll., Buffalo (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
