Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton

Book description:
When five young mothers– Frankie, Linda, Kath, Ally, and Brett– first meet in a neighborhood park in the late 1960s, their conversations center on marriage, raising children, and a shared love of books. Then one evening, as they gather to watch the Miss America Pageant, Linda admits that she aspires to write a novel herself, and the Wednesday Sisters Writing Society is born. The five women slowly, and often reluctantly, start filling journals, sliding pages into typewriters, and sharing their work. In the process, they explore the changing world around them: the Vietnam War, the race to the moon, and a women’s movement that challenges everything they believe about themselves. At the same time, the friends carry one another through more personal changes–ones brought about by infidelity, longing, illness, failure, and success. With one another’s support and encouragement, the Wednesday Sisters begin to embrace who they are and what they hope to become, welcoming readers to experience, along with them, the power of dreaming big.

This appealing book centers around a group of young women who become friends in the beginning of the tumultuous civil rights era. The California setting allows the author to explore a variety of issues but in the end I think there was just too much going on in this novel. I was impressed by how the author presented the mindset of these women- I thought it was a great mix of personalities and a realistic picture of a group of women just coming to grips with feminism. I liked these women, and the way they bonded over writing, but I felt like there were no real surprises and I never found myself making an emotional connection to any of them. In the end, this was an enjoyable read, but it felt rather undercooked.