Bookish Fun In Arlington

Earlier this year I received a phone call from my mother-in-law telling me about this book she was reading on her Kindle.  It was called The Weird Sisters and she thought I might like to read it too.  She gave me a little summary about the book and explained that though the father was a professor of Shakespeare and not a physicist like mine and though there were three sisters instead of the two in my family, there were some similarities between the fictional family and mine.  So I put it on my ever-growing TBR list over on Goodreads.com. 

In April I discovered that the author, Eleanor Brown, would be doing a reading/signing event with one of my favs Sarah Pekkanen here in Northern Virginia at One More Page Books in May.  I ordered the book immediately, started reading it a few days before the event and just in time (four hours shy of the start of the event) I finished reading it.  When I walked into the wonderfully cozy and friendly independant bookstore One More Page Books in Arlington,VA I went over to say hi to Sarah who then introduced me to Eleanor Brown.  Damn do I love that woman!  She is AWESOME!  We hit it off immediately.  I told her that I had finished the book in time (I had typed on her Facebook wall earlier that day that I had twenty pages left to read before that night) and she recognized me from Facebook.  I then shared with Eleanor and Sarah the similarities between my family and the fictional Andreas family.  My mother is a breast cancer survivor, I have a father who is obsessed with physics and grew up surrounded by books and creative thinking and I have a strained relationship with my sister.  Eleanor’s response was, “Well that’s because I was following your family around as I wrote this book!”

Sarah Pekkanen & Eleanor Brown @ One More Page Books in Arlington, VA

 

The discussion was great and the chemistry between Sarah and Eleanor was sensational.  The space is small but adaquate and it was great to see so many people who turned out for these hometown girls.  As you can see it was a very animated and funny event.  Afterwords each author was set up on opposite sides of the store.  I finally got a signature from Sarah for her latest novel Skipping A Beat.  I had read it on my Kindle the week it came out but wanted to get the physical book version for my collection.  With that done I popped over to the other end of the store and hat a nice chat with Eleanor.  I told her how funny I thought she was and that I was looking forward to seeing her again in two days at the Gaithersburg Book Festival in Maryland.  A fellow fan took our picture too which turned out nicely.  

Eleanor Brown & me, Karen @ Planet Books

 

I was so glad to have this opportunity to meat Eleanor and see Sarah again!  Also, for maybe the first time I had the books read before the event.  That made a world of difference because then the conversation is about the book.  It seemed like most of the attendees had read The Weird Sisters too which made for a great Q&A.  I hope that they also take the time to read Sarah Pekkanen’s wonderful second novel Skipping A Beat.  If you can I highly recommend visiting One More Page Books!  It’s the newest indepenant book shop in the DC Metro area but what makes it even better is they sell wine and chocolate and serve both as well as pastries for their events.

The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown

Summary ~ The Weird Sisters ~ The Andreas family is one of readers. Their father, a renowned Shakespeare professor who speaks almost entirely in verse, has named his three daughters after famous Shakespearean women. When the sisters return to their childhood home, ostensibly to care for their ailing mother, but really to lick their wounds and bury their secrets, they are horrified to find the others there. See, we love each other. We just don’t happen to like each other very much. But the sisters soon discover that everything they’ve been running from-one another, their small hometown, and themselves-might offer more than they ever expected.

This book surprised me!  I was a slightly afraid to read it because my mother-in-law had suggested it to me because of the similarities she was finding between the fictional family in The Weird Sisters and my family.  Getting started on book proved to be a bit challenging.  I had just finished reading Tatjana Soli’s The Lotus Eaters which is a thoroughly developed piece of historical fiction set in the tumultuous Vietnam War and the pace of The Weird Sisters took some getting used to.  Once I found the flow of the book I began to enjoy the characters and appreciate the plots.  There is a unique quality about this book that confused me initially.  It is told in plural first person.  I had never read a book in this style before and I kept wondering who was telling the story.  I was so distracting that I found myself Googling that question and was relieved to discover the answer.  Once I understood that there were three narrators, the sisters, I was good to go.  Turns out I wasn’t the only one with that problem.  My mother-in-law had the same confusion as have several people who shared about it on the Internet.

I think the most important thing about The Weird Sisters was what it taught me about Shakespeare.  Throughout the book Brown has the family communicate in difficult moments through the lines and quotes of Shakespeare plays.  She would also provide backdrop of the line and where and why it was said in the original play.  Putting Shakespeare into the context of an American story was brilliant and breathed new life and meaning into the old hum-drum words that I never could thoroughly understand on their own.  I think that incorporating The Weird Sisters into the Shakespeare curriculum in our schools and using it as a reference tool after reading it while reading the plays would help put things in perspective for the high school student of today.  At least I believe it would have for me and maybe I would have done much better than the C’s and D’s I got that semester in high school.

When I first started this book I also had the thought, “Not another character with cancer!”  I have started sharing this opinion with a dear friend of mine with terminal cancer.  She won’t read a book if cancer plays a part in it.  She doesn’t want to read about what she is living through.  Having said that I think that the way Brown wrote the mother’s story, her illness, treatments, horrible side effects and how everything effected her family around her was brilliant.  I learned that Brown’s mother is a twenty-two year survivor of breast cancer.  It showed that Brown had personal experience with the disease in some way because of the care and tenderness with which she wrote those scenes. 

With all that said, I truly took a lot away from reading this book.  I found the sisters, Rose (Rosalind), Bean (Bianca), and Cordy (Cordelia) to be all frustratingly relatable and foreign.  Rose is written like other eldest sisters are written in other books I’ve read but she learns her lesson with grace and quite unexpectedly which was nice.  I do have to say though that not all eldest siblings are the uptight, frumpy, and not as pretty as the rest.  Wink! Wink!  Bean was wicked fun to read and I felt that her problem was by far the most serious of the three sisters.  Cordy was enjoyable and I enjoyed seeing her grow up on the page and discover that she was valuable.  I enjoyed the men opposite each sister.  Rose’s fiance Jonathan was level-headed with a sense of adventure that nicely offset Rose.  Bean’s interactions with the handsome and engaging Father Aiden were a treat to read.  I was really rooting for Cordy when she started to work at the local coffee shop and was reconnected with its owner, Dan, the funny, thoughtful and concerned friend who helped her grow into adulthood without holding her hand too much. 

All in all The Weird Sisters and Eleanor Brown deserve the praises bloggers, newspapers (specifically The Washington Post), and the stints on bestseller lists have given.  A beautifully written book about family facing epic and miniscule problems and trying to make it out the other side with love, friendship and support. 

{Rating ~ 4 out of 5}