A Tribute to a Most Amazing Book
HAPPY DEBUT DAY, ELEANOR BROWN!!!!
Today The Weird Sisters, written by my friend and fellow Debutante Ball blogger Eleanor Brown, was officially released!!!!
Want one? I'll GIVE you one! Just keep reading (or scroll down if you must, I won't tell — but there's good stuff between here and there, I swear!) and you'll find the details at the bottom of the post.
The Weird Sisters is a fantastic book, and the reviews are just raves across the board. Even as I type, it's #119 in books on Amazon's Bestsellers Rankings, and #28 in Literary Fiction.
Here's the official blurb…
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, realizing 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.
And here are my thoughts on it, which I posted this week at The Debutante Ball.
I love this book. I read the ARC, I bought a hard copy, and I'm going to buy another copy to randomly give to someone who comments on this post between now and Tuesday.
Here's the rub. While any comment will qualify you for the giveaway, The Weird Sisters is very Bard-centric, and I want to run with that. I'd love it if your comment has something to do with a Shakespeare experience you've had. That could be just about anything: a performance you loved/hated/acted in, your favorite/least favorite play, a class you took, a movie/book/song based on a Shakespeare play that you loved/hated… the options are pretty endless.
I'll start, just for kicks.
In college, I interned one summer at the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival. Every intern was required to "train" with the artistic director. This A.D. firmly believed that quality iambic pentameter was best delivered from your "core," which he identified not as your diaphragm… but your ass. To practice, every morning we went out to a field and lined up in front of him while he shouted, "SQUEEZE… release." "SQUEEZE… release."… and we followed suit. To make it trickier, he'd have us do blank iambic pentameter while we squeezed:
Him: SQUEEZE!
Us (squeezing): Muh-ma muh-ma muh-ma muh-ma muh-ma muh-ma muh-ma mhu-ma muh-ma muh-ma!
Him: Release.
Did I mention he was at least seventy and liked to wear a Speedo while we ass-squeezed?
Good times.
Okay — you! Give me a comment, any comment, that ideally has anything at all to do with Shakespeare, and you're entered for a chance to win Eleanor's amazing book.
Ready… Set… SQUEEZE!… I mean, GO!
(Oh, by the way, the title to this post is in iambic pentameter — just sayin')
