30B430 Book 26: The Weird Sisters

I don't know what it is, but there are two book themes that I just can't get enough of: relationships between sisters (because I have one, obviously), and books about people who like books. Crazy, right?

The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown, is a book about a family with three daughters who were all raised on Shakespeare, rather than Sesame Street and Barney like the rest of us. This was due to the fact that their father, a college professor at a small liberal arts college, is one of the world's leading experts on The Bard. One of his many eccentricities - he teaches his daughters to express thoughts and emotions through quoting Shakespeare.

The book is set around the homecoming of the three adult daughters, who have returned because their mother is fighting breast cancer. Each comes with their own secrets, and they continue to experience jealousy, sibling rivalry, and those other things that come with having sisters. One of my favorite quotes from the book, "See, we love each other. We just don't like each other very much."

One of the interesting quirks of the book, is that it is told in first person as "We" as though they are all narrating the book together. That took me awhile to get used to, because as the "we" would talk about one of the sisters, you assumed it meant one of the others was the narrator. But eventually you figure out that it is more of a shared "we" throughout. Kind of confusing. At times, annoying.

I often found myself having to look up the specific plays that were being referenced in their quotes, because beyond Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and A Midsummer Night's Dream, I do not know too many of the other plays.

Overall, a very good read. It was a book where I found myself saying, "Okay, just one more chapter," when I really should have been sleeping. Always a good sign. In fact, I started to try to read faster, to be able to finish and write this post. Total nerd.

Just four more books to go to hit my goal!