Author: Jennifer Weiner
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While I really enjoyed Weiner’s other novel, Good in Bed, this one frustrated me - for the bulk of the book everyone’s following their own agenda, and all three main characters are leading completely separate lives. Then, with little subtlety, and far too little substance, a happy ending is engineered, just in time to meet the required page-count for a chick-lit novel.
Chick-lit can be delicious escapist reading. In Her Shoes, is not it.
Jennifer Weiner
There’s chick-lit that is as formulaic as a Silhouette romance novel, and then, just when you think the whole genre is the Malibu Barbie of literature, along comes a book like Good in Bed.
In this novel (which was apparently the author’s first), protagonist Cannie Shapiro isn’t a lolly-pop headed stick-figure of a lead - instead, she’s overweight, underconfident, and totaly real - even to the way she deals with her divorced, and recently out of the closet, mother and her mother’s anti-social partner.
To describe the plot would be to ruin the story, but don’t let the superficial similarities to How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days fool you - it’s a great read.
Jennifer Weiner | Melissa | Monday: 21 March 2005 | 
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