The Weird Sisters

They’re not weird at all.

These sisters are perfectly normal.

The author seems to be exploring her own fantasy world of what could/should/might have been in her life.  Perfectly viable territory, but in a novel of one’s own life, we wind up in dream-land, with happy endings for all concerned, and not too many moral resolutions.  I hesitate to use the words, … .. woman’s writing.  I stand for this opinion, as a male, with characterizations of: vapid, endlessly chatty, and oft-times purposeless.  To be balanced, men are often: vulgar, brusque, and are most-times into (war, sports, and themselves); and that’s men’s writing, which, being a man, I like better than women’s writing.  But that doesn’t mean one is better or worse than the other: just that each of us has our own.  No different than, we don’t read, and thus not like [or dislike] Pakistani or Portuguese literature either.

 

I read this as an autobiographical treatise on the author’s split personality, as exemplified through the three sisters.  Who is speaking, as if it is not a single voice, but rather representing all concerned. ?

There are no sisters.!  It’s a single voice; a clearly unchanging single voice.

It is the voice of the author’s self, with the three sister characters’ lifestyles that she envied, wished for, but never actually experienced for herself.  This is not a, “Hey, this is how I grew up, but I changed the names” type of story.

These characters are extremely composite and will each come out -1-, -5-, or -10- on a 1-10 scale of things like “free spirit” [Cordy-10; Bean-5; Rose-1]  or like responsibility [Cordy-1; Bean-5; Rose-10], ie, Cookie-cutter characters.

Trying to move on from the characters, we run into the same problem with the plot line(s).  The author is pacing the book to wind up in Nirvana for all characters involved.  Now, life doesn’t improve everyone’s lot by the same amount each day, but here we find that strangely, everyone’s current and future situation seems to progress evenly, sustainably, and uniformly from the day they come “home”.  It’s the magic elixir: generally LOVE, but with a mix of: purpose for Bean; companionship for Cordy; and Faith for Rose.  All these things are of course of biblical origins: Faith, Hope, and Charity.

As a book club title, and in the continuing interest of the library readership, this was an OK book.  Nouns and verbs are in the right places.  Some sort of plot line advanced periodically.

For our sort of book, this met the minimum standard, but it dwelled for long periods in the fantasy region of the truly weird, to make a pun.