{"product_id":"the-wednesday-sisters-isbn-9780345502834","title":"The Wednesday Sisters","description":"\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eNEW YORK TIMES\u003c\/i\u003e BESTSELLER • Friendship, loyalty, and love lie at the heart of this 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.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e“This generous and inventive book is a delight to read, an evocation of the power of friendship to sustain, encourage, and embolden us. Join the sisterhood!”—Karen Joy Fowler, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Jane Austen Book Club\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eFor 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.“I read \u003ci\u003eThe Wednesday \u003c\/i\u003eSisters in one delicious gulp. With a smart, entrancing  voice, Meg Waite Clayton sweeps us into the world of the tumultuous 1960’s and beyond,  and gives us the gift of five young women coming into their own as friends, mothers,  wives and writers. \u003ci\u003eThe Wednesday Sisters\u003c\/i\u003e takes their writing group as its core, and  up until the last page, I found myself fervently rooting for each of them as if they  were my friends too.”\u003cb\u003e—Lalita Tademy, author of \u003ci\u003eRed River\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eCane River\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Long  before there were book clubs and play dates, there were the Wednesday Sisters–a group  of women whose shared love of literature transports them above the pains and pitfalls  of ordinary life. While these women may seem like typical suburban housewives, each  character has an intriguing secret and a rich interior life that drew me into the  story and held me there. This remarkable group of women demonstrates that no matter  what period of history in which we live, no matter what race, creed or class we are,  no matter what pains we endure, our one unifying salvation can be books. And this  book reminded me of why I love to read.”\u003cb\u003e—Lolly Winston, author of \u003ci\u003eGood Grief\u003c\/i\u003e and  \u003ci\u003eHappiness Sold Separately\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “I simply could not put down \u003ci\u003eThe Wednesday Sisters\u003c\/i\u003e.  I  gave my heart to Meg Clayton's vivid characters, and I read their intertwined stories  breathlessly.  Move over, Ya-ya sisters!”\u003cb\u003e—Amanda Eyre Ward, author of \u003ci\u003eForgive Me\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eHow to be Lost\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Meg Waite Clayton gives us a group of spunky women–mostly young,  married mothers—who make the unlikely decision in 1967 to form a writers’ group.  Their diverse journeys over the next years in their writing and in their lives add  up to a compelling and deeply moving testament to the power of women’s friendships. I  simply couldn’t put The Wednesday Sisters down until I’d turned the last page.”\u003cb\u003e—Ellen Baker, author of \u003ci\u003eKeeping the House\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Richly intelligent, deeply felt and  incandescently original, Clayton's book is a rhapsodic story of female friendship,  set against wildly changing times and mores. Not only is the book heartbreaking,  funny, and undeniably smart, but truly, this is the kind of book you don't just want  to pass on to all your friends. You \u003ci\u003ehave\u003c\/i\u003e to.”\u003cb\u003e—Caroline Leavitt, author of \u003ci\u003eGirls  in Trouble\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eComing Back to Me\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eMeg Waite Clayton\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of \u003ci\u003eThe Language of Light, \u003c\/i\u003ea finalist for the Bellwether  Prize. Her stories and essays have appeared in\u003ci\u003e Runner’s World, Writer’s Digest,\u003c\/i\u003e and  literary magazines. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School and  was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She lives in  Palo Alto, California, with her husband and their two sons.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. We met at the swings at Pardee Park on Wednesday mornings when our children were young. It’s been thirty-five years, though—more than thirty-five!—since we switched from Wednesdays at ten to Sundays at dawn. Sunrise, whatever time the light first crests the horizon that time of year. It suits us, to leave our meeting time up to the tilt of the earth, the track of the world around the sun.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e That’s us, there in the photograph. Yes, that’s me—in one of my chubbier phases, though I suppose one of these days I’ll have to face up to the fact that it’s the thinner me that’s the “phase,” not the chubbier one. And going left to right, that’s Linda (her hair loose and combed, but then she brought the camera, she was the only one who knew we’d be taking a photograph). Next to her is Ally, pale as ever, and then Kath. And the one in the white gloves in front—the one in the coffin—that’s Brett.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e •••\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Brett’s gloves—that’ s what brought us together all those years ago. I had Maggie and Davy with me in the park that first morning, a park full to bursting with children running around together as if any new kid could join them just by saying hello, with clusters of mothers who might—just might—be joined with a simple hello as well. It wasn’t my park yet, just a park in a neighborhood where Danny and I might live if we moved to the Bay Area, a neighborhood with tree-lined streets and neat little yards and sidewalks and leaves turning colors just like at home in Chicago, crumples of red and gold and pale brown skittering around at the curbs. I was sitting on a bench, Davy in my lap and a book in my hand, keeping one eye on Maggie on the slide while surreptitiously watching the other mothers when this woman—Brett, though I didn’t know that then—sat down on a bench across the playground from me, wearing white gloves. No, we are not of the white-glove generation, not really. Yes, I did wear them to Mass when I was a girl, along with a silly doily on my head, but this was 1967—we’ re talking miniskirts and tie-dyed shirts and platform shoes. Or maybe not tie-dye and platforms yet—maybe those came later, just before Izod shirts with the collars up—but miniskirts. At any rate, it was definitely not a white-glove time, much less in the park on a Wednesday morning.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e What in the world? I thought. Does this girl think she’s Jackie Kennedy? (Thinking “girl,” yes, but back then it had no attitude in it, no “gi-rl.”) And I was wondering if she might go with the ramshackle house beyond the playground—a sagging white clapboard mansion that had been something in its day, you could see that, with its grandly columned entrance, its still magnificent palm tree, its long, flat spread of lawn—when a mother just settling at the far end of my bench said, “She wears them all the time.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Those were Linda’s very first words to me: “She wears them all the time.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I don’t as a rule gossip about people I’ve never met with other people I’ve never met, even women like Linda, who, just from the look of her, seemed she’d be nice to know. She was blond and fit and . . . well, just Linda, even then wearing a red Stanford baseball cap, big white letters across the front and the longest, thickest blond braid sticking out the back—when girls didn’t wear baseball caps either, or concern themselves with being fit rather than just plain thin.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “You were staring,” Linda said. That’s Linda for you. She’s nothing if not frank.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Oh,” I said, still stuck on that baseball cap of hers, thinking even Gidget never wore a baseball cap, not the Sandra Dee movie version or the Sally Field TV one.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “I don’t mean to criticize,” she said. “Everyone does.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Criticize?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Stare at her.” Linda shifted slightly, and I saw then that she was pregnant, though just barely. “You’re new to the neighborhood?” she asked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “No, we . . .” I adjusted my cat’s-eye glasses, a nervous habit my mom had forever tried to break me of. “My husband and I might be moving here after he finishes school. He has a job offer, and we . . . They showed us that little house there.” I indicated the house just across Center Drive from the old mansion. “The split-level with the pink shutters?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Oh!” Linda said. “I thought it just sold, like, yesterday. I didn’t know you’d moved in!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “It’ s not sold yet. And we haven’t. We won’t move here until the spring.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Oh.” She looked a bit confused. “Well, you are going to paint the shutters, aren’t you?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e As I said, Linda is nothing if not frank.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e That was the first Wednesday. September 6, 1967.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e When I tell people that—that I first came to the Bay Area at the end of that summer, that that’s when the Wednesday Sisters first met—they inevitably get this look in their eyes that says bell-bottoms and flower power, war protests and race riots, LSD. Even to me, it seems a little improbable in retrospect that I never saw a joint back then, never flashed anyone a peace sign. But I had a three-year-old daughter and a baby son already. I had a husband who’d passed the draft age, who would have a Ph.D. and a full-time job within months. I’d already settled into the life I’d been raised to settle into: dependable daughter, good wife, attentive mother. All the Wednesday Sisters had. We spent the Summer of Love changing diapers, going to the grocery store, baking tuna casseroles and knitting sweater vests (yes, sweater vests), and watching Walter Cronkite from the safety of our family rooms. I watched the local news, too, though that was more about following the Cubs; they’d just lost to the Dodgers, ending a three-game winning streak—not much, three games, but then they are the Cubs and were even that year, despite Fergie Jenkins throwing 236 strikeouts and Ron Santo hitting 31 out of the park.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Anyway, I was sitting there watching Maggie on the slide, about to call to her to clear away from the bottom when she did it on her own, and I was just a bit intimidated by this blonde I didn’t know yet was Linda, and that occurred to me, that I didn’t know her name. “I’m Frankie O’Mara,” I said, forgetting that I’d decided to be Mary, or at least Mary Frances or Frances or Fran, in this new life. I tried to back up and say “Mary Frances O’Mara”—it was the way I liked to imagine my name on the cover of a novel someday, not that I would have admitted to dreams beyond marriage and motherhood back then. But Linda was already all over Frankie.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Frankie? A man’s name—and you all curvy and feminine. I wish I had curves like you do. I’m pretty much just straight up and down.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I’d have traded my “curves” of unlost baby gain for what was under her double-knit slacks and striped turtleneck in a second, or I thought I would then. She looked like that girl in the Clairol ads—“If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”—except she was more “If you can’t join ’em, beat ’em” somehow. She didn’t wear a speck of makeup, either, not even lipstick.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “What are you reading, Frankie?” she asked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e (In fairness, I should explain here that Linda remembers that first morning differently. She swears her first words were “What’s that you’re reading?” and it was only when I didn’t answer—too busy staring at Brett to hear her, she says—that she said, “She wears them all the time.” She swears what brought us together was the book in my hand. That’s how she and Kath met, too; they got to talking about In Cold Blood at a party while everyone was still slogging through the usual blather about the lovely Palo Alto weather and how lucky they were that their husbands were doing their residencies here.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I held up the cover of my book—Agatha Christie’s latest Poirot novel, The Third Girl—for Linda to see. She blinked blond lashes over eyes that had a little of every color in them, like the blue and green and yellow of broken glass all mixed together in the recycling bin.[quote]--Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club National bestseller","brand":"Ballantine Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304723042533,"sku":"NP9780345502834","price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780345502834.jpg?v=1767742173","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-wednesday-sisters-isbn-9780345502834","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}