The Wednesday Letters **

September's book for our ward book club is The Wednesday Letters by Jason Wright. I just read it this week and thought I'd post a review of it.

I didn't really like this book. It wasn't bad, I guess, but I couldn't recommend it to anyone. It is the story of a family. The parents die in their old age and the kids all come together for the funeral. They discover that their dad wrote a letter to their mother every week... wait for it... on Wednesday... get it, the title? eh?

First of all, it takes almost half the book before they get to the letters, this bugged me. They also uncover a deep, dark family secret through these letters and have to deal with it. I guess the reason I didn't like the book was mainly because I didn't really care about any of the characters. Oh, wait, I did really like A & P. The aunt seemed to be a cool character too, but we didn't see much of her. Maybe it was because the author wanted to keep it short and simple, but the character development left much to be desired.

The other reason I didn't like this book was the ending. It seemed so juvenile. When I was in 7th grade I went to Gifted and Talented camp for writing. While there we wrote a book about the meeting of the trans-continental railroad with the Golden Spike. I recently found and read the chapter that I wrote and I laughed at myself. The ending of this book totally reminded me of my chapter in the book. My mom will get mad at me for this, but have you ever watched Murder, She Wrote? You know at the end, when everything just comes out. That's how this was. There wasn't enough build up to the moment, not enough foreshadowing (though there was some, I guess). Because of this lack of build up, it seems the book was trying to make a giant leap and it fell flat on the ground, for me.

Have any of you read this book? How did you feel about it? I am more than sure that there are people that really like this book, I am just not one of them. If you are, please tell me what I missed. I give it 2 of 5 stars, luckily it was an easy and quick read, otherwise I would have just stopped reading and wouldn't have this lovely review for all of you.