The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown (2011)

The Weird Sisters centres around the Andreas family - the father is a professor who only talks in Shakespearean language and has named his three daughters after the Bard's characters Rosalind, Bianca and Cordelia. The three sisters - who go by the names Rose, Bean and Cordy - return to their childhood home when their mother finds out she has breast cancer. Rose has always assumed responsibility as the oldest of the sisters. She is stuck between her dream job in Barnwell or moving to England for two years with her fiance. Will Rose choose her career over love? Bean, who has been fired for embezzlement, has moved back home as a last resort. Will she be able to move on with her life when she's offered the job as Barnwell's librarian and when it comes to guys will she choose Edward or the new father Aiden? Cordy has come home with a secret - she's pregnant. When she finds love with Dan, owner of the local coffee shop, will it last or will he be off like a shot when he discovers she carrying someone else's baby? In this story of love, forgiveness and the real meaning of sisterhood, Eleanor Brown has done an amazing job expressing the different personalities. (PP)

The Weird Sisters, the debut novel from American author Eleanor Brown, has been creating all sorts of buzz. It has just been released in Australia and New Zealand with a fresh cover for the UK market, left, which frankly leaves the US version, right, for dead. It's about three sisters named after Shakespearean heroines who return to their childhood home. The synopsis says: "The Andreas sisters were raised on books - their family motto might as well be, 'There's no problem a library card can't solve'. Their father, a renowned, eccentric professor of Shakespearean studies, named them after three of the Bard's most famous characters: Rose (Rosalind - As You Like It), Bean (Bianca - The Taming of the Shrew), and Cordy (Cordelia - King Lear), but they have inherited those characters' failures along with their strengths. Now the sisters have returned home to the small college town where they grew up - partly because their mother is ill, but mostly because their lives are falling apart and they don't know where to go next. Rose, a staid mathematics professor, has the chance to break away from her quiet life and join her devoted fiance in England, if she could only summon up the courage to do more than she's thought she could. Bean left home as soon as she could, running to the glamour of New York City, only to come back ashamed of the person she has become. And Cordy, who has been wandering the country for years, has been brought back to earth with a resounding thud, realising it's finally time for her to grow up. The sisters never thought they would find the answers to their problems in each other, but over the course of one long summer, they find that everything they've been running from - each other, their histories, and their small hometown - might offer more than they ever expected." You can read an excerpt at the author's website.

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