A heartfelt story of what it means to be best friends. This book captures the essence of true friendship between two extremely different women. It's filled with humor and pathos and had me laughing and crying before I was finished. ( )

Didn't like this book. At all. It's been years since I read it, so now I don't quite remember why, but I do remember disliking it fairly intensely. I think the characters just annoyed me, and I found myself wondering why anyone would care what happened to any of them. ( )

Having seen the movie Beaches more times than I can count, I was looking forward to the book. I am therefore sorry to say that I didn’t like it that much.
The basic story stays the same: Cee Cee Bloom and Bertie White (Hillary in the movie) form an unlikely friendship when they are 10 and & 7 years old (respectively). Through many years and personal hardships they remain friends, until a tragic illness brings them together.

What didn’t I like about this book? Cee Cee Bloom is not a very nice person in this book, and I found it hard to really care for her. In the movie Bette Midler gives her a clear vulnerability that wasn’t apparent in the book. It also seemed to me that the author had Bette specifically in mind while writing the story, as if it were already a screenplay in her head. The character of Bertie was whiny and sad. I wanted more than once to say: Come on woman get on with your life!!, but it never seemed to happen. The clichéd fate of one of the male characters was kind of ‘been there done that’ and I expected more from the author.
Nevertheless, because of fond movie memories the book scored extra points, that’s why it gets a high 3***.