Certain Girls: A Review of the Jennifer Weiner Novel

One of the hardest relationships to understand in the human world is that between a mother and a daughter. Jennifer Weiner's Certain Girls sequel to her best-seller Good in Bed illustrates this with a tale that takes place twelve years after the first one left off. This novel, told in interchanging chapters between the mother Candace (otherwise known as Cannie) and her daughter Joy as they both go through pivotal changes in their life and the trials they face, alone and together and how they ultimately grow closer.

While most people would term this as "chick lit" it actually leans more towards the genre of "mommy lit". The novel opens with Cannie at the joint bar/bat mitzvah for twin brother and sister friends of Joy. We find out that after her success with a somewhat true telling of her experiences that we read about in Good in Bed that she is now a writer for a popular science fiction series under a pen name and is very comfortable in her life. Her husband surprises her with the news that he wants to have another child; this is an impossibility for her as the birth of Joy by way of an ex-boyfriend ultimately left her unable to reproduce on her own. As such they would have to fin d a surrogate were they to consider having a child together. While Peter her husband loves Joy as his own child (having been apart of their life from the moment of Joy's birth) he yearns for one of his own to have with Cannie.

Meanwhile, Joy is going through what could be termed as typical pre-teen angst. Everything her mother does is wrong and they don't see eye to eye on anything, including what Joy's bat mitzvah theme should be. Also, while Joy is aware of her mother's writing career both as her own novel that she wrote which became a best-seller and her job as the current author of the sci-fi series. A school friend discovers Cannie's novel Big Girls Don't Cry and informs Joy who then finds the novel at a second hand bookstore and reads it and as a result discovers what lead to her birth. She is upset at the secrets her mother has kept from her for so long and tries to discover more about her family history.

Since you read the novel from both perspectives you can sympathize with both mother and daughter as they go through this point in their lives. You understand why Cannie keeps certain secrets from her, including not letting her read her novel as it is very adult and not telling her about her grandfather (Cannie's dad) a man who was not a very pleasant presence in Cannie's life. You understand Joy's frustration as she stands on the cliff of having her bat mitzvah which is suppose to be symbolic of her becoming a woman at how her mother is still treating her like a child. Weiner does a very good job at keeping consistent with the changes of voices more noticeably about how she keeps Cannie's voice as you read it in Good in Bed intact as well as capturing how one would imagine a pre-teen girl to sound. This novel also does a good job of sounding somewhat realistic; many people's problems with novels such as this is how incredibly unbelievable they are but Weiner does make this novel seem plausible.

It comes down to a real talking to between Cannie and her daughter for them to see eye-to-eye, after a cross country trip to see her estranged grandfather and is sorely disappointed by his lack of interest in her life. Meanwhile, Cannie and her husband are able to find a surrogate for their child only to have Cannie face a tragedy during the pregnancy. The two realize that they must be strong together for the sake of the new baby in their life and to make their family unit stronger and more loving.

Certain Girls does raise good questions about how to handle certain hurdles in any parent/child relationship. At what age do you think your child is able to handle the cold hard truth about certain experiences in their life? When do you, as a child, need to stop pushing your parents for answers to the hard questions and accept that, for now, they know what is better for you in the long run? And how can you learn to live in harmony, even when you have drastically different opinions in life and how to handle what is thrown your way? This novel brings Weiner almost full circle because it lets her readers know what happened to the first character she introduced them to and allows her to finish up the story arch she started so many years ago. A good read for all ages, this book will certainly make you laugh, cry, and think about your life as a child and a parent.