I think I picked this one up because it sounded like it might be magical realism, though I’m not sure where I got that impression. It’s not; it instead falls into that category of family/personal drama.
As kind of an aside, I noted when I started reading the book that Eleanor Brown is a local author, and I happened to read in the newspaper a few days ago that she’s hosting some sort of writing class at my local library tomorrow. How random is that? Coincidences work in strange ways.
Title: The Weird Sisters
Author: Eleanor Brown
Genre: This one goes in my “general literature” category.
Publication Year: 2011
Pros: Interesting first-person plural viewpoint, doesn’t get trite or depressing like so many family/personal dramas
Cons: Doesn’t quite justify the interesting viewpoint
I actually enjoyed this quite a bit, so I was interested to note on Goodreads that it actually has a lot of one-star reviews. It just goes to show how arbitrary people’s reading preferences are. Maybe people like those sad, depressing dramas that I want to throw across the room. And I can’t tell you how pleased I was to read a book of this type without a dead baby anywhere to be found.
The book is about three adult sisters (in the late 20s-early 30s age range) who all find themselves returning back home because of their own issues, as well as their mother’s breast cancer. The narration is from a plural first person, which I haven’t seen before, from the perspective of the sisters. This kind of works because each of the sisters regards herself against the other two, but because the sisters don’t really function as a collective unit, sometime it feels a bit weird. (Har.)
The title comes from Shakespeare, and there are a lot of Shakespearean references throughout the book, though they don’t actually seem to have anything to directly do with the plot.
So I’d recommend this book for people who like their drama to not be of the soul-crushingly depressing kind. I found it an easy read, and it’s worth it to give it a try to see the interesting viewpoint, though I will warn that it’s hard to get used to.
Anyone else read this and have opinions? How’s your 2016 going in terms of reading? I’ve finished two novels (including a BFFN–big fat fantasy novel), am in the middle of three nonfic books (whoops), am still very slowly working through a SF anthology, and am reading Web of Air, which is the second book in the scifi!steampunk Fever Crumb series.
