7.28.2015

Reading Challenge Book Reviews #14 & #15



So, this one time I read a book & had absolutely NO CLUE it was actually the sequel to an extremely popular book from years ago.  This is actually quite embarrassing ridiculous because the first book is a STAPLE in the chick lit dept. that I love so & yet I'd never read it! Also...I happen to love the author. Oh the shame! So the category book #14 filled was "A book from an author you love that you haven't read yet"...so I read, Certain Girls by Jennifer Weiner. I loved it! It filled exactly what I was looking for...light & addicting. The main character, Cannie is extremely relatable while she battles with her figure, men & work. I do tend to get sucked into the chick lit books, but ya know what? I don't care. Anyways, I loved this story but while reading it, I just got the sense that there was another book I should have read first. The main character, Cannie, made a few references that felt like she was talking about something that had happened previously, but I didn't really get it. After a quick google search, I discovered Jennifer Weiner's claim to fame Good in Bed was actually the prequel to this book. WHOOPS! So I did what any smart person would do & read Good in Bed for book #15 "A popular author's first book" & I loved it too! Certain girls was written like 10 years later, so I'm sure fans were probably more excited than I was. But overall both of these books were awesome.  The main character, Cannie is extremely relatable as she struggles with her weight, her family, her career & relationships. As per usual, I kindly borrowed the summaries from Good Reads. I recommend reading these books in order, you'll enjoy it more!

Good in Bed Summary
For twenty-eight years, things have been tripping along nicely for Cannie Shapiro. Sure, her mother has come charging out of the closet, and her father has long since dropped out of her world. But she loves her friends, her rat terrier, Nifkin, and her job as pop culture reporter for The Philadelphia Examiner. She's even made a tenuous peace with her plus-size body. 
But the day she opens up a national women's magazine and sees the words "Loving a Larger Woman" above her ex-boyfriend's byline, Cannie is plunged into misery...and the most amazing year of her life. From Philadelphia to Hollywood and back home again, she charts a new course for herself: mourning her losses, facing her past, and figuring out who she is and who she can become.
Certain Girls Summary
Readers fell in love with Cannie Shapiro, the smart, sharp-tongued, bighearted heroine of Good in Bed who found her happy ending after her mother came out of the closet, her father fell out of her life, and her ex-boyfriend started chronicling their ex-sex life in the pages of a national magazine.

Now Cannie's back. After her debut novel - a fictionalized (and highly sexualized) version of her life - became an overnight bestseller, she dropped out of the public eye and turned to writing science fiction under a pseudonym. She's happily married to the tall, charming diet doctor Peter Krushelevansky and has settled into a life that she finds wonderfully predictable - knitting in the front row of her daughter Joy's drama rehearsals, volunteering at the library, and taking over-forty yoga classes with her best friend Samantha.

As preparations for Joy's bat mitzvah begin, everything seems right in Cannie's world. Then Joy discovers the novel Cannie wrote years before and suddenly finds herself faced with what she thinks is the truth about her own conception - the story her mother hid from her all her life. When Peter surprises his wife by saying he wants to have a baby, the family is forced to reconsider its history, its future, and what it means to be truly happy.

Radiantly funny and disarmingly tender, with Weiner's whip-smart dialogue and sharp observations of modern life, Certain Girls is an unforgettable story about love, loss, and the enduring bonds of family.
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