Tag Archives: Meg Waite Clayton

Out Now

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If historical fiction is your type of read,
pick up this book today!

Goodreads:  From New York Times bestselling author Meg Waite Clayton comes a riveting novel based on one of the most volatile and intoxicating real-life love affairs of the twentieth century.

Key West, 1936. Headstrong, accomplished journalist Martha Gellhorn is confident with words but less so with men when she meets disheveled literary titan Ernest Hemingway in a dive bar. Their friendship—forged over writing, talk, and family dinners—flourishes into something undeniable in Madrid while they’re covering the Spanish Civil War.

Martha reveres him. The very married Hemingway is taken with Martha—her beauty, her ambition, and her fearless spirit. And as Hemingway tells her, the most powerful love stories are always set against the fury of war. The risks are so much greater. They’re made for each other.

With their romance unfolding as they travel the globe, Martha establishes herself as one of the world’s foremost war correspondents, and Hemingway begins the novel that will win him the Nobel Prize for Literature. Beautiful Exiles is a stirring story of lovers and rivals, of the breathless attraction to power and fame, and of one woman—ahead of her time—claiming her own identity from the wreckage of love.

Thank you Sarah at Little Bird Publicity
for sending this book.

The Wednesday Sisters

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Author:  Meg Waite Clayton
Publisher: Ballentine Books
Pages:  320
Genre:  Historical Fiction

Source:  My Daughter

Goodreads:   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.

 
Ope’s Opinion:  When you read my review, you should take into consideration that I am not a fan of historical fiction in general.  My daughter Kristi of Kritters Ramblings  gave this book an awesome review, so read her thoughts as well as mine.
 
                                       I did like the friendship the five women had.   I also thought it was kept in the time period accurately.  I just got lost in all the details that Meg put into the story.
 
                                       I found the idea of five women all writing to be unlikely.  It felt like the ones who did want to be writers were pushing the others into writing.  I wanted to see each woman’s interest supported, not just the writers.  
 
                                   It did show me that friendships don’t seem to change.  No matter the time period (historical or present time) we need our friendships – they meet the same need now as they did in the past.
 
Rating:  Two Chairs – I may have one friend who might like this book.