Certain Girls is the sequel to a favorite Weiner title, Good in Bed. Sad to say though, it didn’t live up to my expectations.
I loved Cannie Shapiro in the first novel. She was large, but she was in control. Yes, she had issues she needed to sort out, and we witnessed her journey. Here in the sequel, well, she was still the same, except she is now mom to a rebellious teenager.
I guess I was just surprised that it was more about a mother-daughter relationship. It wasn’t what I was expecting, even though I knew that the story picks up 13 years after Good in Bed. Perhaps I was also hoping that, having published an over-sexualized version of her life, she would have been more forthcoming with her daughter. I thought she would have taken the time to get her acquainted with the real story, or the events that led to her conception.
But in a way I also understand why Cannie couldn’t do that. She wasn’t very proud of everything that happened. There was also a very fine line between reality and fiction. She loved her daughter so much she didn’t want to hurt her.
As Joy prepares for her Bat Mitzvah, she has more and more questions, but she isn’t asking her mother directly for the answers. She decides to do some research on her own and she learns more than what she bargained for.
It was an enjoyable read just the same. The story is told with the alternating voices of Cannie and her daughter Joy.
This book is among the titles that have collected dust here at home for the past year or so. In fact as mentioned here and here, I received the book for Christmas in 2009. So it has actually taken me give or take 32 months before I tore the plastic cover and read it. So when I mentioned that there’s progress in my book-related goals? I wasn’t kidding. 
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