When the Hurlyburly's Done

The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown.  

Amy Einhorn Books/G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2011.  320 pages.
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A dark Cave. In the middle, a Cauldron boiling. Thunder. Enter the three Witches. 
And enter The Weird Sisters, a worthy debut novel about three complicated sisters (all named for Shakespearean characters) who converge at their family home in a small Midwestern college town, ostensibly to help care for and to spend time with their loved and loving mother as she undergoes cancer treatment.  In truth, the sisterly convergence looks an awful lot like retreat from questionable adult decisions, like voluntary withdrawal from wildly careening personal lives. In short order we meet over-thinking and duty-bound Rose (Rosalind from As You Like It), lovely and morally exhausted Bean (Bianca, from Othello), and endearing and spiritually adrift Cordy (Cordelia, from King Lear). Toss in a Shakespearean-scholar father who articulates-- to the brink of exasperation, at times-- both the mundane and the profound in perfectly professorial Measure for Measure iambic pentameter... and we've found ourselves an interesting family.

The story feels fresh, smart, and modern.  It's a love story, a family story, a sister story.  It's about dysfunction and function, about competition and compassion, about hurt and healing, about roof-top confessionals, bedside conversations, and kitchen table conferences that carry us from moments of crisis toward an unconventional yet satisfying domestic idyll.  So idyllic, in fact, that Cellar Door Ending Specialist NWC may find the epilogue a tad too warm... and fuzzy beyond belief.  But like the Bard says, All's Well That Ends Well, and all that warmth and fuzz feel somehow right and good.

 
Double, double toil and trouble;

Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

For a charm of powerful trouble,

Like a hell-broth boil and bubble. 

There's plenty of toil and plenty of trouble in The Weird Sisters, all shared in a wonderfully weird first person plural voice. And here's something else that's weird: despite our observation that parts of the toil feel a little chic-litty and that much of the trouble feels a smidge gimmicky, we end up overlooking all that nonsense because of genuine affection for the three sisters.  Their story is delivered just As You Like It: alternately comedic and tragic, complicated yet full of simple truths, wheeling from whimsical to poignant in the time it takes to stir the pot and fillet a fenny snake. 

Three sisters reading, 1972

It's the way we feel about our own weird sisters: we've laughed with them until we've cried, and we've wept with them until we've smiled again.  Together, we've painted rocks and tried to sell them, pranced around in rolled-up pajamas and galoshes, entered into ill-advised shoving matches over wool skirts, and adopted horribly unauthentic Mississippi or British accents in public, attempting to deceive someone-- perhaps ourselves-- that we were not from around these parts. We've shared bathtubs and transistor radio ear plugs.  We've completely rearranged our bedroom furniture when no one was looking, and we've kicked a gallon jug of apple cider vinegar down the basement steps because we were goofing off.  We've watched the news together, waited until the coast was clear together, and wasted an awful lot of time together-- in short, we've been weird together. 

Weird? A barely perceptible voice whispers across the storied timeline of sisterhood that once upon a time, wyrd carried quite a different meaning-- that Shakespeare's wyrd, in fact, meant fate.  In Norse mythology, three rather Wyrd Sisters spin the threads of fate at the foot of Yggdrasil, the tree of the world.  And so we hear The Weird Sisters speak in unison, "We might argue that we are not fated to do anything, that we have chosen everything in our lives, that there is no such thing as destiny. And we would be lying.” Weird?  Perhaps.  Sisters? Always.  Exeunt.