GoodReads Summary:The three Andreas sisters grew up in the cloistered household dominated by their Shakespearean professor father, a prominent, eccentric academic whose reverence for the Bard left its imprint on his daughters’ names: Rosalind (As You Like It), Bianca (The Taming of the Shrew), and Cordelia (King Lear). The siblings eventually left home and escaped their ponderous monikers with nicknames, but their mother’s medical maladies brings them back. Before long, their unwelcome reunion reveals that they all have problems: Rose is force-feeding a troubled relationship; Bean is entangled in a big city case of embezzlement; and unmarried Cordy is pregnant. Eleanor Brown’s first fiction has justly won praise as “thought-provoking… poignant… sparkling and devourable.”
I have to admit when I first started reading I was confused by the narrating style. Then I realized it was a first person plural style and it made perfect sense. The way the story is told you get the sense that the events have already happened and the sisters are re telling it along with their new insights. It was the perfect way to tell this story.
The author selects something that a majority of people, especially women, can relate to. The sisters come home because in one way or another they are not where they want to be in life and decided to return home in the hopes of finding their way. The fact that their mother has cancer is just a superficial reasons that they used to hide the real reasons from each other and themselves. As many people do they lose their way in life and have to find a way to go on. They book has illustrates how what we imagined is not what we have planned but sometimes the way things work out is exactly what we need.
The author poignantly uses sister relationships to describe ultimately human relationships in candid honesty. The relationships reflect how people keep secrets and attempt to hide them but ultimately through sharing and exposing oneself you can find redemption. But at what cost does this redemption come? Does it mean being more free and having to give up a dream and settle into a new life? If you give up something is it worth the cost or is the alternative even better?
There are many surprises in this book that keep the reader engaged. The reader should be able to feel a bond with one of the sisters and relate to how things are going and how things ended. I myself could relate to more than one and was invested in how the story ended. It kept me turning the pages until the end.
