After a month of heavy reading and intense “Top 10” list-making, it feels good to start the new year with a fun, light-but-not-silly novel, The Weird Sisters. As you might guess, this is a total play on Shakespeare, with lots of direct references to the Bard’s works, including Macbeth from which the title originates. The weird sisters are Cordy, Bean and Rose named after great Shakespearean women Cordelia, Bianca and Rosalind respectively.

Bean and Cordy return home to their small college town of Barnwell as young adults, ostensibly to care for their mother who’s been diagnosed with breast cancer, but more importantly to restart their lives after small disasters have struck. Rose lives in her hometown and teaches math at the college, where her father is an acclaimed Shakespeare authority and professor. (He speaks to the family mostly in direct quotes from Shakespeare, a playful take on the somewhat removed father figure, especially in a household of four women.)

This is a book about sisters and the roles played by each within the family, and in particular between the girls themselves. It’s a riff on families with some fun twists that add spice to the mix. Toss in a family that loves books, a local library that plays prominently in the Andreas family story, and a small college town (that goes dead in the summer) and you’ve got a book that fills that all-important place – something fun but not trivial, something well-written and smart, and a book that entertains without being the least bit sappy. It’s a tough bill to fill, but first-time novelist Eleanor Brown pulls it off with ease. ~Wendee