Meg Waite Clayton
I just love stories about friends, their relationships, and their struggles, so when I picked up The Wednesday Sisters from the new fiction shelf the other day, I knew I had to find out who these "Wednesday Sisters" were. The first two lines of the novel immediately pulled me into the story:
"The Wednesday Sisters look like the kind of women who might meet at those fancy coffee shops on University – we do look that way – but we’re not one bit fancy, and we’re not sisters, either. We don’t even meet on Wednesdays, although we did at the beginning."
It turns out that the friends, not sisters – Frankie, Ally, Brett, Linda, and Kath – meet in a park in Palo Alto, California, in September of 1967, and find themselves meeting every Wednesday after that with their kids in tow. The group has nothing in common, it seems at first glance, except that they are all defined by what their husbands do as they take care of their children and household duties. As the story unfolds, however, we find that the friends are all tied together through a love of great literature.
Over the years, the Wednesday Sisters form a writer’s circle to express their hopes and dreams, their fears, and struggles as they experience history in the making – the Vietnam War, the race to put a man on the moon, and a women’s movement that challenges everything they believe – while living through their own challenges like breast cancer, infidelity, and failure. At times moving and heartbreaking, the story is also humorous, illustrating the strong bond that forms between friends.