You will like this book if you come from a family of all daughters, have cared for a sick parent, and love Shakespeare. Well, if you know me, you know this book is right up my alley. I am the middle of three girls, watched my dad fight cancer and wrote both my bachelors and masters theses on Shakespeare. But I would hope that even if you are not any one of these three that you would like the story.
The Weird Sisters caught my eye due to the title – they are the witches of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, or as Noa pointed out when she saw the cover “hey! The band in the Harry Potter books is called the Weird Sisters!”
The story is set primarily in a small college town where the girls’ father is a long-time Shakespeare professor. He named his three girls after three of Shakespeare’s characters: Rose (Rosalind from As You Like It), Bean (Bianca from Taming of the Shrew) and Cordy (Cordelia from King Lear). He often speaks in Shakespeare’s words and lines and his daughter and wife sometimes do as well, showing that while none of the Andreas women studied Shakespeare, it is undeniably part of their lives. Although none of his daughter’s grasp his passion for Shakespeare, they realize they all have something of the playwright: “Rose’s passion for order. Bean’s for notice. Cordy’s for meaning.” (p282)
The three daughters each return home to care for their mother who is diagnosed with cancer – or at least that is their public reason. They each are single, at a crossroads and very unsure. Returning home to their ill mother and to each other forces them to face who they are and if they are content with themselves. Returning home as adults, they see each other and their parents as adults for the first time – and most readers know this feeling. Their eyes adjust to viewing the parents are married partners, their siblings are grown women and it causes them to reevaluate what they really think of and feel for each other: “We have always wondered why there is not more research done on the children of happy marriages. Our parents’ love is not some grand passion, there are no swoons of lust, no ball gowns and tuxedos, but here is the truth: they have not spent a night apart since the day they married. How can we ever hope to find a love to live up to that?” (p143)
The book seems to be written by the three sisters, collectively. They refer to “our parents” and admit to their own stories, but add the “we” and “us” in as if they all know the entire story/each other’s stories. The girls are three very different people, but there is a “oneness” about how they tell the story, even if the cover tagline of the book is “See we love each other. We just don’t happen to like each other very much.”
While I really liked this book, I thought I would adore it, merely due to the criteria as listed in the first paragraph. But I will surely reread it and hope you try it. One thing I did adore about this book is that every member of the Andreas family is a reader – they carry books with them everywhere and are content sitting in silence, reading their individual books. As the sisters tell about one of their former boyfriends: “Because despite his money and his looks and all the good-on-paper attributes he possessed, he was not a reader, and well, let’s just say that is the sort of nonsense up with which we will not put.” (p72)
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