The Wednesday Sisters eBook edition

The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Clayton is as close to a perfect beach read as you can get. 

It is a rare book that has one smart, engaging and has a well rounded and believable woman character.  Never mind five of them!  This is the story of five women living conventional lives in unconventional times.  

From a purely technical point of view, Clayton has pulled off an impressive feat.  She manages to make each one of these five women real and full character who all get equal time and equal voice.

The story starts with the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and traces these women's lives through roughly 10 years.  Those ten years include the Apollo space flights and burning bras; peace marches and Miss America contests, the birth of modern Silicon Valley and the first New York Marathon. 

The story is about women and friendship.  As the world around them changes these women are busy building relationships with each other and with books. 

In a broad sense It is about family.  The ones we come from and the ones we create.  It is about the frailty and fortitude.  It is about awaking, change and growth.

It is also laugh out loud funny and tear-jerkingly sad.  I mean really, how can you resist a book that starts out:

"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."

I was hooked from the first paragraph.

So grab your suntan lotion, your favorite drink and a bag of chips, sit in your favorite lounge chair and prepare to enjoy!

Here's the publishers synopsis:

          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.    

Use Coupon Code BKS4ME at checkout to receive a 5% Discount on this ebook title.

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All We Ever Wanted Was Everything eBook Edition

If you are interested in a study on how secrets warp relationships and families, this is your book. 

If you want to feel the pain of privilege, by all means read this book.

If you enjoy reading about addiction, denial and keeping up with appearance, then this book was written just for you.

If you want sharp social commentary with a little humor, find another author.

All we Ever Wanted Was Everything is an exercise in wretched excess.  From the multi-million dollar high tech executive's wife to the humorless feminist daughter, the characters are excessive, shallow and unsympathetic. 

I really wanted to like this book. From the blurb it sounded like great fun.  Unfortunately, it was pretty much torture to read.  The writer is about as humorless as the feminist daughter. 

Tell me doesn't sound like a great summer beach read:

When Paul Miller’s pharmaceutical company goes public, making his family IPO millionaires, his wife, Janice, is sure this is the windfall she’s been waiting years for — until she learns, via messengered letter, that her husband is divorcing her (for her tennis partner!) and cutting her out of the new fortune. Meanwhile, four hundred miles south in Los Angeles, the Millers’ older daughter, Margaret, has been dumped by her newly famous actor boyfriend and left in the lurch by an investor who promised to revive her fledgling post-feminist magazine, Snatch. Sliding toward bankruptcy and dogged by creditors, she flees for home where her younger sister Lizzie, 14, is struggling with problems of her own. Formerly chubby, Lizzie has been enjoying her newfound popularity until some bathroom graffiti alerts her to the fact that she’s become the school slut.

The three Miller women retreat behind the walls of their Georgian colonial to wage battle with divorce lawyers, debt collectors, drug-dealing pool boys, mean girls, country club ladies, evangelical neighbors, their own demons, and each other, and in the process they become achingly sympathetic characters we can’t help but root for, even as the world they live in epitomizes everything wrong with the American Dream. Exhilarating, addictive, and superbly accomplished, All We Ever Wanted Was Everything crackles with energy and intelligence and marks the debut of a knowing and very funny novelist, wise beyond her years.

You'd think you would have to love a feminist who actually names here 'zine Snatch.

You'd think that drug dealing pool boys, country club ladies and evangelical neighbors would add (at the very least) great color and a few laughs.

You'd think that a novel about women pulling together would end up being a "feel good" reading adventure.

In all cases you would be wrong.

Obviously, I hated this book!

 

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The Scandal Plan: Or: How to Win the Presidency by Cheating on Your Wife (eBook edition)

I admit it. . . I am (or at least I used to be) something of a political junkie.   A regular watcher of CNN, MSNBC,CNBC and Comedy Central (Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert). 

This year has been something else!  Almost in spite of myself, I ended up watching all of the debates; both Democratic and Republican.  I am pretty sure I watched election night coverage for every primary. I even watched Hillary's concession speech on Saturday.  At this point, I am pretty well burned out on politics.

So if I am so sick of politics, why did I pick up The Scandal Plan by Bill Folman?  Probably because I couldn't help myself.

Satire appeals to my sense of the absurd and I am always a sucker for a good farce.  OK, I know it is hard to believe that anything could be more farcical then this year's election process; but actually this particular book is! 

Folman pokes fun at the American obsession with image and political correctness.  We want our candidates to be perfect; but not too perfect.  We want them to be Statesmen; but we want to sit down and have a beer with them.  We want them to be authentic; but we are unforgiving of any slips of the tongue or small gaffes.

Folman also has a little fun with the media.  He pokes fun at the 24 hour news cycle and the silliness of over reporting.  He points out how really easy it is to create a news story out of nothing.

The book is an easy read and it is tempting to pass it off as silly and overly cynical.  But I found it to be surprisingly insightful.  Folman takes dead aim at the current political landscape and almost always hits his marks. If nothing else it is a great morality tale on the unintended consequences of a lie. 

The Scandal Plan is highly entertaining; the perfect answer to political burnout and a great beach read!

The publisher says:

Senator Ben Phillips is the perfect man for the presidency. If only he weren't such a straight arrow. He's getting battered in the polls, and with only a few months until Election Day, his staff is growing desperate. Enter Thomas Campman, political guru. On a sudden inspiration, the eccentric Campman is convinced he can revitalize the candidate's image by creating a fake sex scandal for him. Nothing too over-the-top—just a little scandal to make Phillips seem more human. Maybe even cool.

Though it takes some convincing, Phillips gives Campman the green light. The plan is set in motion, and, right on schedule, a phony former mistress steps forward to accuse the senator of infidelity. But scandals—even the premeditated kind—rarely go as planned. Before long, Campman's scheme snowballs into a three-ring circus complete with a linguistically challenged Mexican chauffeur who thinks he's James Bond, a highly sexed middle-aged woman who's convinced she'll never land one of the really good guys, and a political cub reporter for TeenVibe magazine who's sure he's on the trail of the biggest story since Watergate.

For those too well acquainted with politics-as-usual, The Scandal Plan is the perfect antidote. It's a witty political farce in the tradition of Jon Stewart and Dave Barry that will have readers—and even candidates—laughing all the way to the polls.

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