Eleanor Brown (1) (1973–)

I am going to tell you right up front that I did not like this book. Sometimes I just can't get into a book, but this was different. This was objectively bad, and I was sort of angry at the book in an uncharacteristic way. So, fair warning on that -- here are my thoughts.

Remember how on Sex and the City each character was a cut-out, a Manhattan archetype, but together they were a blast. After some time it became clear that though each character was one dimensional, all togeter they made one show more complete person - the four women were one character at the end of the day. Sure that person was a pure egoist, sophisticated yet utterly lacking in substance, but man was she entertaining. So, the Weird Sisters are exactly the same as the SatC characters, each woman flat and selfish (in slightly different ways)but all made to fit together into one character. To underline the fact that these characters make one person the book is written in some sort of multiple first person. This is a really irritating device.

Where do the women here part company with the SatC crew? Well, instead of witty and pretty these women are entirely humorless and badly dressed. (There is one sister who is supposed to be very stylish, and then she is described as wearing a short linen jacket with a long denim skirt. Trendy sister wears Indian skirts and tank tops. Fair to say that the writer has no idea what would be considered stylish outside of a small town gardening club or Burning Man.) Not one of these women has anything about her which is appealing so when blended they make this polymorphous character who has absolutely nothing to interest anyone. Rose is a self-righteous prig, Bianca is a pathetic, self-centered dishonest slut, and Cordelia is a ridiculous flighty modern day hippie who wears pigtails though nearly in her 30's and takes no responsibility for anything. Add to that the fact that these women are in a small town in Ohio (I am thinking Oberlin.) A lovely bucolic place, but not NYC by a long shot, so the most interesting character in SatC, namely The City, is absent too.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy unlikeable intersting characters. I love Chuck Palahniuk, Jennifer Egan, Philip Roth and Jonathan Franzen among others, and there are not many people to love in the work of any of those authors. I do require that the people who inhabit a story be interesting, that there be something about them I want to figure out. There are no layers here to pull back. I really can't think why anyone would want to know more about any of these women. I wanted to get away from them.

So, we have established that I found the leads awful, poorly drawn and fundamentally ugly but the secondary and tertiary characters are even worse. The father, a Shakespeare scholar, really just needs to die. He is utterly disconnected to everyone around him and speaks in quotes from the Bard. He named his daughters for 3 of Shakespeare's most difficult women characters. Let me emphasize that he speaks essentially entirely in quotes from Shakespeare's plays (not sonnets for some reason.) How boring and useless do you need to be to speak only with someone else's words. Granted, if you are going to channel someone, Shakespeare is a good source, but at the end of the day this person is no more than a high-falutin' Charlie McCarthy. The mother, coffee bar boy, philanderer, and fiance are ciphers. Blech!

There are so many good books out there. Don't waste your time here. show less

3.5 trending up. This book is begging to be discussed - there is a lot going on, but primarily, it blows the topic of adoption wide open. The author has some personal experience with this, which is appreciated. No single adoptive family fits a mold, which she eloquently reveals. As much as humans seek patterns, this truly is a 'case by case' situation. The created family here is pretty complex: Brianna, birth mother had Phoebe at age 14, raised her with help from her mother until she had show more twins (Tate and Taylor) and her mother (grandmother for story purposes) passed away. Brianna could not cope, so two different families adopted the siblings. Ginger, single woman who knew Phoebe from school adopted her. Tabitha and Perry, wealthy power couple, adopted the twins, and all determined to stay a family in an open adoption. This worked well until Brianna became pregnant again (same father with all these kiddos, who bails again) and baby Violet is adopted by Elizabeth and John. That's just the back story. The current drama takes place at a family vacation arranged by Tabitha - everyone leaving behind their Denver location and gathering in Aspen at a rented house for 2 weeks. Phoebe is now twelve, the twins are 6 or 8?, and Violet is close to a year old. While they are happy to call themselves a family, and all the siblings delight in each other, the adults have a few issues to work out among themselves - Ginger is an introvert who doesn't like change, Tabitha is a control freak with a kind heart and best intentions, and Elizabeth is hating motherhood. Violet was the decision after IVF failed and she has not healed from that. Drama enough - then Brianna calls (she was supposed to attend but couldn't get away from work). She is pregnant again and would like someone in the 'family' to adopt the new baby. Elizabeth and John are the obvious choice, but Elizabeth flat out refuses - she is overwhelmed. She was my favorite character. The others are content with their older children and a baby just isn't in the cards. So now they have to 'expand' the family which comes with many risks, especially since they are currently so fragile already. The narrative, told from each of the mother's points of view, is interspersed with 'essays' from potential adoptive parents, each making a case for themselves and telling their story. Infinite reasons and variety - and the pressure of choosing (and not choosing) are conveyed well by these additions. I loved The Weird Sisters, Brown's first book, and remember it being very literary. I felt these characters were a tad type-cast, though by the end I was seeing their nuances and liking them more. Most of all I appreciated the insight of adoption's complexities. "After all, who gets to say what it means to be a family? There are no names for the relationships they have to each other. There is only this broad word they are shaping around themselves: 'family', even though they aren't exactly a family; that word isn't exactly true, isn't exactly right." (4) show less

Hoo boy, was this a reading rollercoaster! I spent the first half of the novel wishing I had a physical copy to rip in half and pitch across the room, and then I suddenly adjusted to the very middle class faux family and finished the book in a day. My problem was personal, however, and thus the reason I have given four stars to a book that raised such a negative reaction: I don't have children and do not want them, either biological or adopted, so once again I think I got on the wrong bus show more here, but I wanted to learn more about 'open adoption'. Eleanor Brown is an author reminiscent of Anne Tyler, very character driven, and I fell effortlessly in with her fictional parents and the summer vacation from hell. Two of the women, and the 'family' arrangement as a whole, however, drove me mad.

Brianna, the birth 'mom', had her first child at fourteen and understandably, given that the conception was statutory rape, wasn't able to care for her daughter, who went to Brianna's mother. She then had twins four years later, to the same deadbeat dad, and whoops! wasn't ready to care for those kids either, so grandma took on two more babies. Unfortunately, grandma then died and left three young kids with only an idiot mother and absent father - until social services stepped in and put them up for adoption. Eldest daughter Phoebe goes to one of her teachers, Ginger, while the twins are snapped up by wealthy micromanager Tabitha and placid husband Perry. Dumbass Brianna of course still hasn't learned the concept of contraception, and five or six years later, hooks up with the same guy - is the woman a goldfish, seriously? - and plans to parent the next baby herself. Until history repeats, dad absconds, and another baby is up for adoption, because apparently abortion is not an option. Young couple Elizabeth and John, who have bankrupted themselves on years of IVF but can't have children, run into Tabitha, literally, who suggests them as adoptive parents for baby Violet. They take the baby on, but the stress of a collicky new born almost breaks Elizabeth, who realises that she is not a natural mother and can't cope with any more children. The three adoptive parents vow to form a larger 'family' for the sake of the children, mostly at the instigation of Tabitha, the group control freak, and go on holiday together in Aspen - when guess who calls with an announcement?

Oi vey. I wanted to shove a cork up Brianna and push Tabitha off a picturesque mountain after the first few chapters. Firstly, in the words of eldest child Phoebe, “So if she doesn’t want to be a parent, then how come she keeps getting pregnant?” And the way we're supposed to love the silly cow as much as much as the other mothers - or Tabitha, at least - was infuriating. I'm guessing Brianna's blasé attitude to parental responsibility was supposed to be a more sympathetic case than rescuing the kids from a darker biological background, but I just found the circumstances unbelievable.

Secondly, all of the mothers have issues and a detailed psychological resume to explain why. So Tabitha is controlling and interfering because, in the words of Elizabeth (one of my favourite characters), she is an only child and 'harped endlessly about how terrible it was, like she’d grown up in a workhouse in a Dickens novel'. Elizabeth refuses to adopt another baby because she was neglected and bullied as the youngest child and now thinks she isn't a good mother. Ginger wants to keep Phoebe in a childhood bubble because she is an introvert who prefers to 'stay inside with a book for the sake of the environment' and hates change. I mean, I get the message, but the lesson I learned was that none of these women should be let loose around kids! Tabitha riled me the most, though, and I didn't feel sorry for her when the other women finally snapped and served her with a few home truths (of course they all later apologise and realise how alike they are and how Everybody Needs Tabitha).

Sarcastic Elizabeth and introspective Ginger saved my sanity, I will admit, especially Elizabeth's scathing if somewhat biased take on Brianna: 'Hasn’t anyone ever talked to her about condoms? Why is it that she won’t have an abortion? Does she have to be the saint of all fertility? Jesus Fucking Christ.' I felt their frustration over Tabitha's vacation, which never seemed to end, and her perfect middle class lifestyle (crudités and educational toys, etc). Elizabeth even meets Tabitha by crashing into her SUV. I also enjoyed Eleanor Brown's writing, which is very soothing and far too convincing in places! (I most definitely don't regret being childfree!) I am just clearly not the intended demographic, although I did learn a lot about 'open adoption', which was I think the author's goal. A frustrating but thought-provoking read! show less

I loved this satisfying, hopeful, intelligent book from start to finish. It’s a sort of belated coming of age story about three twenty-something sisters who grew up in the small college town where their father is employed as a Shakespeare scholar. Their mother has just been diagnosed with cancer and they are all back home.

Each of the sisters is named for a heroine from Shakespeare and the title, The Weird Sisters, comes from Shakespeare’s play Macbeth. When Macbeth was written the word show more “weird” meant something closer to fate, and the book’s story contains a mixture of determinism, because each sister is influenced by being born with a particular birth order into a household consumed with Shakespeare, and free will, since each sister immediately sets out to carve her own life.

When I read in reviews that The Weird Sisters has a first person plural narrator, a "we" that includes all three sisters, I pictured a homogenized Greek chorus and was extremely skeptical that the book could delve deeply enough into any of them to be interesting. That turned out to be far from true, and far from being interchangeable these sisters have stark differences that make it hard for them to get along sometimes. Part of why the first person plural works so well—and it would be worth reading the book for that alone—is that being family the sisters spring from a common origin, share a common history, have common understandings and know each other very well, in spite of their dissimilarities.

And they all love reading. When a soon to be dumped New York City boyfriend of Bianca’s asks incredulously how she has time to finish a few hundred books a year, she narrows her eyes and, in a speech that will be thrilling to the reading addicts in the audience, she tells him she doesn’t waste hours flipping through cable channels complaining that nothing is on, doesn’t spend her entire Sunday on pre-game, in-game and post-game TV, and doesn’t hang out every night drinking overpriced beer with other hot shot financial workers. Instead, every moment in line, on the train, or eating she, and her sisters, spend reading.

But their differences are as significant as their similarities and all three have big decisions to make. Rosalind, the oldest, and has a passion for order, being in charge and staying put. Bianca, the middle child, has taken great risks because she longs for attention, glamour and the kind of cosmopolitan life that can only be found far from their Ohio hometown. Cordelia, the youngest, is a hippie vagabond and is newly pregnant with no father in sight, which is straining her role of being Daddy’s favorite.

Part of the charm of the book is that it is full of beautiful scenes, especially the ones that have some of their common memories of childhood, like the time they danced with wild abandon together on their porch and the time they “borrowed” the family car when none of them was old enough to drive because they wanted to eat oversize, late night ice cream cones. I am looking forward to Eleanor Brown's next book. show less