I feel like there is so much to talk about when it comes to The Wednesday Sisters! I’ve been getting lots of feedback from readers. Some have really loved elements of the story line, or characters while others have found too much of the book to be outlandish and unrealistic.
In a super quick nutshell, in true Wednesday Sisters fashion, I will start out by saying what I really appreciated about the book…
– I absolutely adored these five women. I loved how they guardedly became more translucent with one another as their friendships deepened. I loved growing to know them through their completely human strengths and weaknesses. Though I’ve not read anything else by Meg Waite Clayton, I really loved her character development in this story.
– The imagery painted of the era, (as well as the area) made the five year time frame as much of a character and a part of the Wednesday Sisters as the girls themselves… Not an easy task, I imagine. It seems like there is a fine line between coming across as an encyclopedia excerpt and a description full of cliche’ pop-culture hype. Instead of either one of those extremes I felt the time alive, as though I’d been there with my own recollections of the moments… (which I wasn’t, being born in 1976)
– Even though I knew that the story line with Danny was headed somewhere huge and relevant to today, I deeply loved unwrapping it through the story. Being someone who is bored to tears at the mere mentioned of Silicon Valley, where we are visiting next month (plans set in motion long before I’d even heard of this book), I’m not really interested. Chw will be thrilled as he gets wrapped up in the history of all that technological stuff…
– I saw myself in each of them. I related to each main character in one way or another.
– I was completely immersed in the way the era, for women, paralleled their lives, self discoveries and the evolution of their friendship.
– One of my favorite scenes, if you will, was the one leading up to the moment when Frankie crowned Danny Mr. America. LOVED it. i loved the moment when, beyond her own lonliness, hurts and rejection she allowed herself to see her husband for the man he truly was- and embrace him. So often we do that- we place our spouses (and others) in these one dimensional little boxes. I equally loved how his eventual (and natural) reaction to this was stepping up in support of her passions and taking pride in her. SO true to marriage..
– I was moved, beyond words at times, by gestures made between them. By the raw reality of their situations. The section of the book where Jeff reacted to Linda’s lump- heart wrenching. There wasn’t anything plastic or “story book perfect” about it. He reacted as any human could, be they a husband or a doctor. Later, with her secrecy. The reasons why she kept things to herself. How she dealt with the loss of her mother, even so many years later. Gripping. The same with Kath’s marriage. What a horrible position to be put in NOW, but then? With the societal standards the way they were- not to mention the familial pressures. Impossible positions. Jim and Ally… Being one who has carried that infertility burden, as I know many of you also have, my heart just throbbed for her. The loss of pregnancy along with that stripped feeling of failure and the loss of femininity and purpose is beyond hell. When you throw in the issues with Jim’s race, mixing it with an era barely progressed from the Civil Right’s movement and everything just seems so much heavier. I truly could go on and on about these things, these beautifully woven and written things with honestly did make me deeply love The Wednesday Sisters– both the characters and the book…
To be brutally honest though, {And because they were with one another, I kind of feel like I have to be…} i struggled with a few of the elements of the story which felt plastic. Specifically four of them…
One would be the ending. Or at least the beginning of the ending. Namely the Johnny Carson moment, on. While larger than life things do happen, and dreams really do come true like that, once in a blue moon (is that enough cliche’ references for ya’ll?) I felt like the pages of this book seemed to be awfully full of them. (to clarify, I do not mean full of Cliches, i mean full of unrealistic things.) Meg paints such a vivid and evolving canvas for us, complete with intricately crafted historical tie ins. She does this so BRILLIANTLY that the majority of the novel felt, to me, so real and homey… But then you have these great big “fix alls” that make it all seem, well, familiar and synthetic. The ending, for me, was like that.
Second would be Hope. I’m sure there were readers thrilled with the Hope storyline, but I wasn’t. I am sure, at my confession of this, a few people would say it’s because my own miscarriage and fertility story never resulted in the birth of a baby. That’s not my problem with the storyline though. My problem with it is that, almost always, the story ends this way. The broken and desperate girl loses baby after baby, dying a little more inside each time and then her happily ever ending comes neatly wrapped in a bundle of baby goodness. Statistically when you take women who have multiple miscarriages, like this, less than 2% of them can carry a baby long enough to sustain it’s life without loads of money and the assistance of some major medical technology. Developping the character in such a tragically honest way and then plucking a baby (or two, actually) in her arms is like cutting a blooming rose off at the stems tip, just beneath the blossom. Depth is gone. Root- gone. Plastic. And, the 98% of the statistic, who read this book and never get that happy ending- where is their character to relate to? Where is their little kernel of life to embrace here?
Third is Kath’s job. Not that it couldn’t happen. Again, I just felt like there were too many “amazing developments” taking away from the “reality and relatable” aspects of an otherwise great book.
Fourth was the running. I never understood why, out of the blue, Linda had become a runner. Then, after she’s sick she mentions her mom being so weak before she died. She talks about how she is so much stronger than her mother. It made sense then, that she’d been a runner. I saw that, then, in her character. The drive. The passion for it… The belief that by running she could control something bigger than she dare speak of. So it just annoyed me a little bit that she hadn’t always been a runner.
So, enough of my tangents and praises… I want to hear from you! Thoughts??? What did you love about it??? What didn’t you love about it???
A few other questions:
– did you find yourself wishing you could have a Wednesday Sister type group?
– which character did you find you related more with?
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