The Wednesday Sisters: A Novel
Friendship, loyalty, and love lie at the heart of Meg Waite Clayton's 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.For 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.From the Hardcover edition.
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Community Reviews
Perhaps for an older audience - it's interesting for those who want to know what it was like to live in the 1960s - issues like should you work/accept a cheatin' husband/go to the doctor because there's a lump in your breast - crazy things like that which no one even second guesses today...
I really wanted to like this book. It's about friendship, the 60's and 70's, motherhood and marriage, and writing. What's not to like? Well, for one thing, a book that tried too hard to promote a point of view (feminism) with somewhat wooden, cookie cutter characters and very stilted dialogue (who says "Heaven's to Betsy"???). There were some moments of good writing -- when the main character and narrator described a story she wrote that was based on her own experience of not being allowed to go to college because of her father's pride and her mother's weakness, it was moving and poignant. The author's description too of Frankie's marriage and it's ups and downs also rang mostly true. But the things that were supposed to be funny -- I only knew that because the characters laughed. They weren't really funny. And the ending was so rushed! Why is she writing about these years (which spanned the late 60s and the early to mid 70s) 35 years in the future? Especially because after the climactic event, nothing more ever happened? No other books were written? No more babies? And Kath's marriage? The resolution to that was just so incredibly unbelievable. It's almost as though Ms. Clayton simply got tired of her book and wanted to end it, which is incredibly rude to her readers who have invested their time and money in this book.
This is a book of finely drawn and distinct characters. I think it must be easy when writing a book about 5 women to have them all be similar in some ways, but the Wednesday Sisters (as they call themselves) each have their own identity. Each has their own struggles and fears and joys. Through Clayton's vivid writing, we get to share all of these as each character shares them with the group and gains strength from the sharing.
An excellent book of the power of women's friendships, this is also a story of how these women, young mothers at the end of the 1960s, each react differently to the women's liberation movement and other cultural upheavals of that time.
The story is told through the eyes of one of the women, looking back from 35 years later. Her tone is nostalgic for that era (in a very progressive way), but at the same time there is repeated foreshadowing of events to come, both in the lives of the Wednesday Sisters and in the world around them. Aside from this slightly troubling dichotomy of tone, this is an enjoyable book.
An excellent book of the power of women's friendships, this is also a story of how these women, young mothers at the end of the 1960s, each react differently to the women's liberation movement and other cultural upheavals of that time.
The story is told through the eyes of one of the women, looking back from 35 years later. Her tone is nostalgic for that era (in a very progressive way), but at the same time there is repeated foreshadowing of events to come, both in the lives of the Wednesday Sisters and in the world around them. Aside from this slightly troubling dichotomy of tone, this is an enjoyable book.
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