Book Review: The Wednesday Sisters

I put this book on my TBR list because I guess some blogger really liked it and gave it a resounding review. Yep, so, I'm glad somebody really liked it. Oh, it wasn't terrible. There was one part that even brought a tear to my eye. But mostly I just found the particular narrative style of the novel hokey, unbelievable, and therefore faintly irritating.

So The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton is about a group of moms who find each other and become lifelong friends. There is a stereotype for each mom: the jock, the southern belle, the brain, the depressed, the unfulfilled. And the setting is fraught with potential: 1968 in Palo Alto, California. So somehow these women manage to somehow be privy to, whether via TV or in real life, every huge event that happens in the 60s and 70s. You name it, they experience it: women's rights, war protests, assassination of the Robert Kennedy, man walking on the moon, the beginning of the computer era. They witness way too much. And tragedies of all kinds happen to them, as well: infidelity, infertility, cancer, squashed dreams.

To top it all off, they all decide to be writers. A couple of them even have best sellers. I don't know. The novel just felt so very contrived, and I just couldn't get past that they all shared these huge historical moments together as young mothers and had deep philosophical discussions about the events. Seriously? I don't know how that works.

You might want to use this book as a filler between heavier books. Once you start reading it, you will want to know what happens to the characters and why one of them wears white gloves all the time, so you'll probably keep reading it. Afterwards, you'll might wonder why you kept reading it— or maybe that's just me.

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