The Weird Sisters are Rosalind, Bianca, and Cordelia Andreas, ages 33, 30, and 27 respectively. All of them have returned home, purportedly to help their parents cope with their mother's breast cancer treatments. In reality, Rose suffers from inertia, finding herself so attached to hearth, home, and family that she is unable to leave Barnwell, the college town where she grew up, to follow her much-loved fiance to England when he is offered a temporary position at Oxford. Bianca (aka Bean), unbeknownst to her family, returns home in disgrace, having been fired from her job after the payroll "adjustments" she made in order to afford her increasingly demanding lifestyle are discovered. Cordy, after years of wandering the country and in and out of the beds of almost any man she fancies, finds herself pregnant and uninterested in finding the baby's father, an itinerant artist with whom she shared a meaningless fling. The three sisters, daughters of a Shakespeare-quoting college professor (too funny, even if you are not a fan of the bard), are named for Shakespearean characters and grew up reading constantly, deprived of television and other normal childhood. Even now, books are scattered throughout the house and the family seems to just pick them up at random and continue reading wherever the last reader left off.
Brown focuses on the Andreas' skewed family dynamics in this, her debut novel, and it's all about the sisters. Rose is a martyr, the family organizer, the practical one. Bean is the needy attention-grabber, the pretty, ambitious one whose need to maintain her standard of living engulfs everything else in her live. Cordy is the free spirit, the baby of the family who never quite needed to grow up until now. Individually, they are interesting, but together they are hilarious with a touch of desperation. Anyone with sisters will appreciate this novel, and anyone who has ever had to return to their childhood home for comfort and a safe haven will sympathize with the Weird Sisters. The title, by the way, harkens back to the three witches in Macbeth.
lOVED THIS BOOK! CUTE STORY ABOUT SISTER'S COMING BACK TO THE HOME NEST DEALING WITH THE SICKNESS OF THEIR MOTHER AND THEIR ECCENTRIC DAD WHO PREFERS TO QUOTE "THE BARD" ENJOYED IT
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