The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown

They've all come home to support their mother through an illness and because each is at a juncture in their lives where they are struggling.  The father of the family is a Shakespeare professor at the local university and the girls were brought up in a house without tv, everyone reading instead.  Each sister left and struck out on their own but now are back, to help their mother and to try to patch their own lives together.

Rose is the eldest.  She had been a professor herself but has been informed that she wasn't on the tenure track and wouldn't have a job the next year.  Rose has always felt like she was the second mother, trying her best to keep everyone in line and on the straight and narrow.  She is engaged but her fiance is overseas for a year.  He wants Rose to join him but she quails at the thought.  Bianca or Bean as everyone calls her is the sister who men are attracted to.  She couldn't wait to get out of town and went to New York where she landed a high-paying job.  Now, after a scandal, she has come home crestfallen, without either a man or a career.  Cordy is the youngest and everyone knows she was spoiled.  When she left, it was to roam the country, never staying anywhere long and depending on the generosity of others to make her way.  Now she is back and is pregnant.

Each of the sisters use this time to try to put their lives together.  Will Cordy keep the baby?  Can Bean find happiness in the small town she couldn't wait to leave?  Should Rose take a professorship at her hometown university or leave everything familiar behind and join her fiance overseas?  Eleanor Brown has written a novel that touches on the uncertainty most people face in their own lives and that illustrates the relationship between parents and their grown children and the sibling relationships that are forever in place.  This novel is recommended for readers of women's fiction.