Thursday, August 25, 2011

The Weird Sisters

Any book that's populated with a family of bibliophiles is bound to win some points with me. The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown is just such a book, with an engaging story to boot.

It tells the tale of three adult sisters, the product of a Shakespearean scholar father and a daydreaming mother who's prone to wandering off with her nose in a book while dinner burns. They simultaneously find themselves all living back at home in the small college town they grew up in, each trying to flee a problem of her own while caring for their ill mother and trading quotes from Hamlet and King Lear. Though the characters are eccentric, the story had a nice, realistic depth to it. One or two scenes stood out as being a little stereotypically drawn, but they faded into the background of the whole. And a passage on pages 70-71 that describes the deal-breaking effect of a dislike of literature is in itself worth the price of admission.

No comments:

Post a Comment

LinkWithin

Related Posts with Thumbnails