Fact or Fiction?

Yesterday one of my sisters asked if I could pass on our other sister's Certain Girls. She is on summer vacation after finishing her second year of her PhD program, so she wanted to have some chick lit now that she has a little bit more time for it. I told her I would read it ASAP and get it in the mail. In about 24 hours I had finished the 384 page book and loved it!

I mentioned in previous posts that I like books told from multiple perspectives and this book alternated voices between mother and daughter. In this case it was the best of both worlds. When I was reading from Cannie's (the mom's) perspective it was like any other chick lit book, but when I was reading from her daughter, Joy's, perspective it was just like my favorite YA novels.

I could have sworn that I read Jennifer Weiner's other book Good in Bed with Cannie as the main character. I kept on thinking that references to the book would start clicking, but they never did. I went on Amazon and read the first few pages and it still did not seem familiar, so maybe I only read Weiner's other books In Her Shoes, Little Earthquakes, and Goodnight Nobody. I voraciously read her books along with Sophie Kinsella's when my sisters introduced me to chick lit my first year teaching. I already added Good in Bed to my Amazon wish list, and I also can't wait to read her short stories collection The Guy Not Taken.

Apart from the multiple perspectives, I also enjoyed the concept of authors who write "fiction" that actually involves a lot of truth from their real lives. In Julia Alvarez's book Once Upon a Quinceanera when she talked about events in her real life I realized how they closely related to her fiction works. Later in the book she even talks about how her mom was always bothered how she told all about her family in her novels. Although Cannie's is a fictional character thinking about how her reality mixed with embelishments composed her books and how it affected her life, I know that it is a real topic that writers face.

It was agonizing to see Joy read her mom's book without being able to ask her mom all the questions it brought to her mind as to what was true and what was fiction. Joy is quite the investigator trying to put together all the pieces on her own and blacks out sections of the book that she doesn't like. From Joy's point of view she says, "Fiction, I wrote. But just because it was fiction didn't mean there wasn't truth in there somewhere, glimmering, like coins at the bottom of a well. Who was she? I wondered as I recapped my pen. Who was my mother, really? And who am I?" (pp. 141-142).

Among it all the mother/daughter pair are also negotiating the details of Joy's bat mitzvah. I am not familiar with bat mitzvah's but it was interesting to catch glimpses of it from this book. There was also the element of unexpected surprises as I was blindsided with a shocker toward the end of the book.

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed both voices and the events in the book.