Hurricane season begins early and rumbles all summer long, well into September. Often people’s lives reflect the weather and The Hurricane Sisters is just such a story.
Once again New York Times bestselling author Dorothea Benton Frank takes us deep into the heart of her magical South Carolina Lowcountry on a tumultuous journey filled with longings, disappointments, and, finally, a road toward … disappointments, and, finally, a road toward happiness that is hard earned. There we meet three generations of women buried in secrets. The determined matriarch, Maisie Pringle, at eighty, is a force to be reckoned with because she will have the final word on everything, especially when she’s dead wrong. Her daughter, Liz, is caught up in the classic maelstrom of being middle-age and in an emotionally demanding career that will eventually open all their eyes to a terrible truth. And Liz’s beautiful twenty-something daughter, Ashley, whose dreamy ambitions of her unlikely future keeps them all at odds.
Luckily for Ashley, her wonderful older brother, Ivy, is her fierce champion but he can only do so much from San Francisco where he resides with his partner. And Mary Beth, her dearest friend, tries to have her back but even she can’t talk headstrong Ashley out of a relationship with an ambitious politician who seems slightly too old for her.
Actually, Ashley and Mary Beth have yet to launch themselves into solvency. Their prospects seem bleak. So while they wait for the world to discover them and deliver them from a ramen-based existence, they placate themselves with a hare-brained scheme to make money but one that threatens to land them in huge trouble with the authorities.
So where is Clayton, Liz’s husband? He seems more distracted than usual. Ashley desperately needs her father’s love and attention but what kind of a parent can he be to Ashley with one foot in Manhattan and the other one planted in indiscretion? And Liz, who’s an expert in the field of troubled domestic life, refuses to acknowledge Ashley’s precarious situation. Who’s in charge of this family? The wake-up call is about to arrive.
The Lowcountry has endured its share of war and bloodshed like the rest of the South, but this storm season we watch Maisie, Liz, Ashley, and Mary Beth deal with challenges that demand they face the truth about themselves. After a terrible confrontation they are forced to rise to forgiveness, but can they establish a new order for the future of them all?
Frank, with her hallmark scintillating wit and crisp insight, captures how a complex family of disparate characters and their close friends can overcome anything through the power of love and reconciliation. This is the often hilarious, sometimes sobering, but always entertaining story of how these unforgettable women became The Hurricane Sisters.
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Recently I was hotel-bound in Hong Kong as the result of, you guessed it, a hurricane. Correction: typhoon. Whatever you call it, had it not been for a lack of viable alternatives, I likely would not have finished. I didn’t hate Hurricane Sisters, per se, but I found the characters to generally be really big whiners.
Dorothea Benton Frank has written this novel primarily through alternating points of view by three members of the Rivers family. Daughter Ashley is the clear protagonist – a starving artist, she fashions herself as the second coming of Jackie O and bemoans the fact that she’s never once gotten to visit Paris. (Side note: this is hard to swallow given the money Frank tells us this family has.) Fast on Ashley’s heels is mother Liz, who continually laments 1) her horrible mother (Ashley has nicknamed her own parents “The Impossibles,” so there’s definitely a bit of a theme here) and 2) that no one in her family has ever cared one lick about her work with victims of domestic violence. Dad Clayton is experiencing a bit of a mid-life crisis and does his own share of poor me-ing. Brother Ivy (as in Clayton IV) makes only brief appearances, which is a shame because he is the only one who doesn’t carry on constantly about the hand he’s been dealt.
The family, as you’ve probably gathered, is a bit dysfunctional. The book opens with Liz and Clayton bailing her mother of of jail for walking a llama on a highway. It gets simultaneously wackier and entirely more believable from there, in a you-can’t-make it-up kind of way. Snake charmers and sleezebag pols are only two of the types who play bit parts and starring roles.
Upon finishing Hurricane Sisters, I understood why Frank made her main characters so irritating. And, frankly, I was able to appreciate what she had done; I definitely liked the book better after I’d finished it than I did while I was reading it. That said, some chapters were a slog when all I wanted to do was reach through the pages and shake someone (which, yes, is a testament to Frank’s skill as an author). In that sense, it wasn’t so different from my experience reading the Lowcountry Summer trilogy last summer. Maybe books set in South Carolina in summer are not my thing.
Despite the fact that I opened this review noting that I only finished Hurricane Sisters because of an actual hurricane, I wouldn’t completely write it off. This is a fine beach/airplane read provided the reader can bear a hearty helping of whining along with the hijinx.
(This review was originally published at http://www.thisyearinbooks.com/2016/08/the-hurricane-sisters.html)
Good beach read.