The Wednesday Sisters
Books | Fiction / Literary
3.7
Meg Waite Clayton
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Friendship, loyalty, and love lie at the heart of this beautifully written, poignant, and sweeping novel of five women who, over the course of four decades, come to redefine what it means to be family.“This generous and inventive book is a delight to read, an evocation of the power of friendship to sustain, encourage, and embolden us. Join the sisterhood!”—Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book ClubFor thirty-five years, Frankie, Linda, Kath, Brett, and Ally have met every Wednesday at the park near their homes in Palo Alto, California. Defined when they first meet by what their husbands do, the young homemakers and mothers are far removed from the Summer of Love that has enveloped most of the Bay Area in 1967. These “Wednesday Sisters” seem to have little in common: Frankie is a timid transplant from Chicago, brutally blunt Linda is a remarkable athlete, Kath is a Kentucky debutante, quiet Ally has a secret, and quirky, ultra-intelligent Brett wears little white gloves with her miniskirts. But they are bonded by a shared love of both literature—Fitzgerald, Eliot, Austen, du Maurier, Plath, and Dickens–and the Miss America Pageant, which they watch together every year. As the years roll on and their children grow, the quintet forms a writers circle to express their hopes and dreams through poems, stories, and, eventually, books. Along the way, they experience history in the making: Vietnam, the race for the moon, and a women’s movement that challenges everything they have ever thought about themselves, while at the same time supporting one another through changes in their personal lives brought on by infidelity, longing, illness, failure, and success. Humorous and moving, The Wednesday Sisters is a literary feast for book lovers that earns a place among those popular works that honor the joyful, mysterious, unbreakable bonds between friends.
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More Details:
Author
Meg Waite Clayton
Pages
336
Publisher
Random House Publishing Group
Published Date
2009-05-05
ISBN
0345502833 9780345502834
Ratings
Google: 4.5
Community ReviewsSee all
"This was the most wonderful book loving,beautiful,heartfelt and heartbreaking at times. The Journey of friendship"
Lindsey McLoughlin
"Where do I start with this review? I had high hopes for this book. I went into this book thinking that these women would be bright, funny, witty, interesting, other synonyms for awesome. I was very disappointed. The women in this book are boring. They are very dependent upon their husbands and have no real opinions of their own. <br/><br/>One woman, Frankie, spends half the book worrying about what will become of her if her husband loses his job, because she views herself as only as good as what her husband does for a living. Gross. <br/><br/>Another woman, Ally, believes she is not woman enough because she continues to miscarry and can't bring a pregnancy to term as if her entire life purpose is to be a wife and mother. Gross. <br/><br/>A third woman, Kath, refuses to divorce her husband when he has an affair with a woman who shares her name. She continues to stay with him even after he moves into an apartment with his mistress because she doesn't want her friends and family to know he's left her. God forbid society know that she's a working single mother. Gross.<br/><br/>After finding out that she has breast cancer, Linda struggles with the decision to have a mastectomy because she'd rather die than live with the idea that her husband may not want her because she no longer has breasts. Gross. <br/><br/>And finally Brett...graduated valedictorian of her class at Stanford and goes on to get a graduates degree. She dreams of becoming an astronaut but throws it all away to become a stay at home mom because she doesn't want society to know she is smarter than her husband. Very gross. <br/><br/>These things might be okay if the point of the story was that they overcame them, but they do not. The exception being perhaps Linda who does in fact get the mastectomy and Ally who finally has that baby. But Frankie never sees herself outside of her husband, Kath never leaves her cheating husband, and Brett never becomes an astronaut, or does anything substantial with her degree.<br/><br/>The plot of this book is all over the place. There are things mentioned briefly that are somewhat intriguing but never mentioned again. Things that are brought up that have no relevance whatsoever. To be completely honest, I'm not certain what the plot even is. <br/><br/>To sum up this review, I'll answer a couple simple questions.<br/>What did I obtain from reading this book? A headache.<br/>What feeling was a left with once finishing this book? Relief it was finally over."
Nichol Jones