Certain Girls

Once again, I will gush about the wonder that is Weiner. Jennifer Weiner, to be exact, but I guess the other kind has its positives too.

After you've read a couple of Weiner's books, there are certain characteristics and a certain tone that you eventually come to crave, actually being drawn to reading one of her books, knowing nothing other than that she wrote it so it has to be good. Weiner's Good In Bed is what initially sparked my love of her so you can imagine my excitement when I happened to find a sequel: Certain Girls.

Reading Good In Bed first is a must if understanding auxiliary characters is something that is important to you. Otherwise, I think the overall theme and general plot of the book is something a lot of women can relate to, especially mothers and daughters.

Cannie Shapiro I Won't Even Attempt Her Married Last Time, is the very understatement of "helicopter parent," long before that was even a thing. Her now-teenager, Joy, is your typical, American teenager, embarrassed by her mother and critical to everything she says, does, and wears, but is otherwise beautiful, intelligent, and empathetic. When curiosity gets the better of her and she picks up the fiction-based-on-non-fiction novel her mother published shortly after she was born, Joy's life feels turned upside down. While both blaming her mother and dying to know about a part of her mother's past, she sets out in search of it, be damned she's only 13!

What she finds is both heartbreaking and heartwarming. Through personal experience and by traveling through her mother's past, Joy learns what makes us all human, not perfect and worth understanding and at least sympathy. She learns things aren't always what they seem and that maybe most dark clouds do have silver linings. And that loving your mother really isn't so terrible after all.

With a certain amount of humor you come across in her other books noticeably absent, the laugh-out-loud moments were few and far between, something that also surprised me with her The Guy Not Taken: Stories. But she touches on some difficult subject with charm, wit, and a healthy dose of sarcasm. It's a good curl-up-with-an-Irish-Coffee kind of book while still making you think - especially as a mother to a daughter - how will I handle her questions to me about my past? It also proved to be a beacon of how my writing might one day affect her. It also made me think about my mother and how she handles my questions about her past. What we all want, when we're Joy at age 13, is to not know our mothers are human. When we're an adult with daughters of our own, what we want to know is that they are human.