I had read a few reviews of this book via the blogosphere, and just loved the sample that I downloaded on my Kindle. It took weeks for me to get it from the library, but it was worth the wait!

“The Weird Sisters” tells the story of three very different (but actually very similar) grown sisters, as they return home to deal with their mother’s battle with breast cancer. Their father is a distracted and brilliant Shakespearean scholar, and thus the girls are named after Shakespearean heroines: Rose (Rosalind), Bean (Bianca), and Cordy (Cordelia). The whole family takes solace and refuge in books, and their literary worlds are often more real to them than the real world itself. Coming home to their sleepy college town of Barnwell, each sister also has her own issues: Rose (who actually has never left Barnwell) is struggling to take flight from the town and her parents by marrying her fiance, Bean has left her job in NYC due to embezzlement, and Cordy – the waif like wanderer – is newly pregnant by an unnamed source. Each of the girls revisits the status quo of their growing up years, and redefines her place in the family. As the dust jacket reads, they love each other, they just haven’t learned to like each other much!

I just loved this book! As the youngest of three sisters, there was something so compelling about their story to me. I’ll be the first to say that my sisters and I are not like these girls in temperament (we’re all three more like the responsible Rose than like Bean or Cordy); however, there is something almost universal about birth order that rings true whether you are the eldest, the youngest, or the “middle”.

I really enjoyed the portrayal of these women and how they changed throughout the story. As they grew to understand each other, they better understood themselves, and this journey helped bring them closer to their parents as well. Interestingly, the book is written in first person plural — using “we” as the omniscient narrator – a device that took me a bit to get used to, but served to enhance the cohesion of the sisterly unit for me.

5 Stars from me!!