Our book club chose “The Weird Sisters” by Eleanor Brown as the book to read last month. Personally, I thought it might have been condensed into a short story a bit, but it was a good read considering the family dynamic of the three sisters each playing a role in the psychological “birth order theory” and I guess that a psychologist would have done. he preferred the book more for its nuances than a regular reader who had no siblings to grow up with. Let’s talk.
In the book, the father of the three sisters was a literary master, he named his children after Shakespearean characters, more or less, variations on character names, if you will. When he talked to his daughters, he used quotes from Shakespeare, which made it hard to read what he was saying, and that made growing up a little different from a normal family: what is normal, right? Yes, imagine growing up in such a family.
Interestingly, the author of the book wanted to call it “Trinidad” at first, 3 daughters, and use biblical quotes as if the man had been a preacher, she decided against it because that could limit the book’s marketing and audience. She had asked me while reading the book; What if the father was a general quoting Sun Tzu, Karl Von Clausewitz, Machiavelli, Winston Churchill, Eisenhower, Schwatzkoff and Rommel? Or, what if the father was a physicist who quoted all kinds of equations, mathematics, and quotes from Einstein, Hawking, Sagan, Arthur C Clarke, Feynman, and other notables in science?
That would have made a good book too, or a short story, maybe a series would be good, something like Sue Grafton with her AZ strategy books? Or like Ben Bova, the science fiction writer who writes about every planet in his stories?
This book generated a lot of thought in our book club as everyone related to their lives, their siblings, and how they and their brothers and sisters had grown up, perhaps fitting birth order stereotypes or not. Would you recommend this book to other book clubs? Yes yes I would but beware not everyone is going to like it and it will bring out your own growing up baggage family dynamic after all like I said “what is normal” and they are really normal families thankfully . It’s not how I see it. I hope you too will enjoy this book and think about it afterwards.