2008 ( )

I loved this, and stayed up until 2am to finish it. Weiner is commonly tagged as 'chicklit', but she writes well. In this one, there's no romance. There is love, and loss, and struggling with mortality. And she's often very, very funny. ( )

Maybe I'm not cut out for chick lit. Or Weiner was on auto-pilot. Probably a mistake to return to old characters.

I knew this was what I call an airport book, what others call a beach book (but beaches are for hard books!). That's when I read them--when I know I'll be killing time. But flipping through this I realized it wouldn't last long enough. While better written than that Hollywood Wives writer, I read it in the same way: Will Cannie and cookie-cutter perfect husband get a surrogate child? Will the bratty teenager--oh, who cares? The chapters are told in alternate voices: the mother's, then the kid's. It's not working when the reader skips a chapter or three to keep with the mother narrator. The kid isn't convincing. I don't have much sympathy for a 12-year-old that wants a $300 dress that will only be worn for a single event or for their parents that ultimately shrug and buy it.

Weiner's grammar, punctuation and writing are fine. Often they're pretty bad in chick lit books, or what I think is chick lit. I have read one of Weiner's previous books. In comparison, this one seems lazy: stereotypes in lieu of description. The return of Weiner's/Cannie's fugitive father--ouch. Cameo appearance by movie star friend who doesn't get a line or a character.

Perhaps this book wasn't chick lit because there wasn't a romance? I don't think the Samantha friend counted because she was like a male author's caricature of a 40-something single woman. This is the kind of woman more likely to hire a surrogate or visit a sperm bank.

I think, tho, if you're a well-maintained lawyer of that age, it's really not so difficult to find male compansionship. Women like that often have much younger partners. Don't men vastly outnumber women on these dating sites, just as in the heyday of newspaper personal ads? Marriage, yes, may be more difficult. I also found it dubious that a beautiful lawyer just looking for a date to a wedding to would be sticking to a Jewish singles dating site. And the bratty kid doesn't have any non-Jewish schoolmates or friends? But I digress.

So (spoiler alert!) with no warning (well, I'm not going to flip back), the adoring diet doctor husband (who doesn't have a problem with 2 quarts of ice cream in the fridge, though his wife is fat) drops dead in one of the final chapters. Readers seem upset by this but I think the reasoning is obvious: we're going to see another sequel with Cannie character as single middle-aged mother seeking love while (one hopes) her bratty kid is off at college. ( )

Fun, quick read. ( )

Jennifer Weiner's fifth novel revisits her first. Good in Bed put Weiner on the map as a "chick-lit" superstar, but her books are something more than that, which is one of the reasons I really like her. Certain Girls picks up the story of Candace "Cannie" Shapiro and her daughter Joy, whose unexpected conception and premature birth were pivotal events in Good in Bed, twelve years later...

Weiner has chosen to use dual first-person narration, with alternating chapters told by Cannie and Joy, and I think it works really well. Each of the characters has a distinctive voice, and getting both of their perspectives on significant events in the story is enlightening; I thought that letting the reader see both sides was a particularly effective way of illustrating some of Cannie and Joy's frustrations and difficulties in communicating with each other. Having been a parent of teens (and not done yet), I could relate to both Cannie's blind spots about her daughter and Joy's self-centeredness - but by the end of the book, they've both made some progress.

I enjoyed Certain Girls, and Jennifer Weiner remains on my "author's I've got to read" list. She's a sharp and observant writer who creates characters that are smart, funny, flawed and human. Some parts of the story seemed a little far-fetched to me, but Weiner makes it all work, including the emotional connection.

READ MORE: http://www.3rsblog.com/2009/07/thursd... ( )