The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton

Tons of positive reviews of The Wednesday Sisters have been circling the net for a while now. I'm probably one of the last people to actually sit down and read it.

And though I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, I don't think it had quite as much affect on me as it could have if I had not just recently finished The Knitting Circle. Thankfully there were some unexpected twists and turns that continued to keep me completely engaged. And don't get me wrong, I ADORE women's fiction, because I love studying human relationships, but I felt that these two stories in particular very much paralleled each other regarding the issues involving women and their friendships.
I still recommend it as a great read, I would just make sure to space this one out with the other friendship books out there that seem to be flooding the market.

Description: 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.

Here are other reviews I came across (if you have one that I haven't listed, let me know and I'll update the list!):

The Read Feed
The Written Word
Leafing Through Life
Rhonda's Corner of the World
Breaking the Spine

Rating: ***1/2

Recommend: It really was a great read!