The Hurricane Sisters

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.