Sisters

Somewhere along the line {possibly only because of another book I've been reading} I got myself under the impression that The Weird Sisters was about a family of witches.  I was all set to start out by saying (again) that I'm not into vampires and witches, not at all, I never read this stuff {true!}, but here I am reading this stuff, now for the second time, and enjoying it surprisingly much. {That, my friends, is what happens when you start writing blog posts in your head before you even read the book. Not recommended.}  As it turns out, the sisters - Rosalind (Rose), Bianca (Bean) and Cordelia (Cordy) - are not witches, and they're not even so very weird, except, sometimes, to themselves.  They're a family of obsessive readers, which is the best kind to read about. They're grown daughters, in their twenties and thirties, still  tied in different ways to the small Ohio college town they grew up in and to their Shakespeare-scholar father and their mother, who has just started treatment for breast cancer.

I read that this is Eleanor Brown's first novel, and it's beautifully written (and funny, and warm, and all those good things).  There were turns of phrase that had me reaching metaphorically-speaking for a pen so I could remember them, and others that made me think 'well, that was trite, but that's OK, she'll get better.'  The conceit that I loved, once I figured it out, was the narratorial {is that even a word?} voice. Something seems off at first, and then it makes perfect, perfect sense. (I don't want to spell this out...it's a small thing, but too nice not to discover for yourself.} 

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