The Wednesday Letters

Author: Jason F. Wright

One-sentence summary: A married couple dies in each other’s arms and their three children find their father’s once-a-week letters to their mother and unravel secrets about their past and relationship.

B.A.D. Girls Book Rating: 6

Our favorite thing about it: Being swept up into the story about a couple and their family.

Our least favorite thing about it: The lack of character depth and the contrived parts of the story.

Main Topics of Discussion: Marriage Relationship, Communicating with Children, Sibling Relationships, Death, Honesty, Immaturity, Authors and Writing

Our favorite quote: This will be added later. I've had the rest of this post written since last Wednesday and just didn't look up a quote. Still haven't. So, instead of holding the whole thing up any longer - I'll post a quote as soon as possible! Sorry!

Notes: Although all of us said that we thoroughly enjoyed reading the book, our relatively low rating comes from the fact that we found some parts of the book/story unbelievable and contrived and this annoyed us a little bit. Some of these things were: Malcolm’s continual storming out of the house, the relationship of Rain and Nathan, the fact that the parents relied on their letters to tell their story even though the letters leave out some major parts, Matthew and his wife’s happy ending, the neatly tied-up ending in general, Laurel keeping such a secret from her husband, Jack’s response to the revealed secret, the kids’ responses to meeting their mother’s attacker in the end, etc. However, we thought that the message of forgiveness in this book was refreshing and the author is unabashed in promoting this message. We all wanted to read the two missing letters that the author left out: Rain’s letter to Malcolm and Jack’s letter to Rain. We would have liked to get to know the siblings better as characters but we generally enjoyed their realistic interactions with each other after their parent’s deaths.

Memorable Meeting Moments: Baked Potato soup on a chilly night and the long-awaited reveal of Becky’s book selection: The Book Thief!