Book Review: Certain Girls

First up in my book review week is a light beach read.

Book Review for: Certain Girls
By: Jennifer Weiner

Certain Girls is a sequel to Good In Bed, but can be read as a stand alone novel. Cannie is a novelist who pretends she is nothing more than a stay-at-home mom and a perfect housewife. In reality, she is the best-selling author of a tell-all memoir (okay, fictional memoir based on her evil ex who got her pregnant and left) that shook up the world years ago. Now she hides behind a pen name writing for a science fiction series and pretends her best-selling book never happened. Except her just-hit-puberty daughter–which she has devotedly and painstakingly sheltered all her life–has just found the book… and read it. And she’s got questions. Lots of questions. About her conception. About her father. About her mother’s past. And most of all–was she even wanted?

In the meantime, Cannie’s husband is urging her to consider expanding their family through the use of a surrogate and her editor is pushing her to peek out from behind the shelter of the pen name and be ‘Cannie, best-selling author of the fictional expose’ once again.

What’s a gal to do?

Shop Indie Bookstores

Book Review: Goodnight Nobody

Book Review: Goodnight Nobody
By Jennifer Weiner

Take suburbia, take cookie-cutter, large, new homes, take the scariest uber, super-dee-dooper mom you know and magnify her, then multiply her, put it all together along with some literal backstabbing…and you have the backdrop for Goodnight Nobody.

Kate Klein is a former-reporter who has 3 children who are all 3 and under. Due to a stroller-napping int he big city, she finds herself safely tucked away in the Land of the Lost, i.e. suburbia. It all seems like a typical ‘I don’t fit in, please help me God’ day until she arrives at a playdate to find the uberest super-mommy lying in a puddle of her own blood. Kate slips into detective mode (but only while her children are in playschool) and resolves that come hell or high water, she will solve this crime. Naturally, she ruffles many feathers, freaks out her over-protective husband and maybe, just maybe, collects the attention of a former flame.

Shop Indie Bookstores

Mimicry Exercise Experiment #3

(This is the fourth blog post in a series on writer’s voice and style mimicry. Read the exercise explanation, exercise experiment #1 and exercise experiment #2 by following the links.)

After today’s experiment, I am left wondering, am I not experimenting with work that different enough from my own writing? I keep expecting to get hit with this ah-ha moment. While typing out the pages from other writer’s, I feel the author’s voice, I get where they are going with the characters, scene and story. I see how they are not shying away from using ‘was’, ‘had’, and ‘that’. I see how they are using ‘telling’ effectively. (Obviously, some rules are for breaking.) I see how they are giving us all those internal pieces we need to believe in the character and their actions.

Today I mimicked Jennifer Weiner’s Little Earthquakes which is in third person, past tense with several character POVs. Okay, I lied. I didn’t mimic. I typed out a full, single-spaced page (and a bit) in Word and then found I had no inkling to pick up the story on my own, imitating the style and voice. It wasn’t the story’s fault, as I love the story. The characters are great. The scene is something I can identify with. Yet, there was no desire to pick up someone else’s story and carry on with it. My muse doesn’t want to work that way. I found this in the other exercises, but managed to push through. However, today, my writing mind said “Enough!”. It didn’t simply apply the brakes, but it applied the emergency brakes too. It was not going there. So we didn’t.

Even though I didn’t mimic Jennifer Weiner, I did learn from the expert, so all was not lost. Weiner has a great way of zipping and zapping around back and forth through time and settings. The character is at home in bed, then we are transported to the doctor’s office, then to the delivery room 6 weeks prior, then back the apartment a few days before now, and again, back to the bedroom. All within a page or two as she weaves the story together, giving background, and setting up where the character is coming from psychologically. Very cool. With one simply cue, she has you in a different setting, pulling another important piece from the past, then zips you back to the present. She’s a pro!

This is the end of my mimicry experiment. While I don’t think I will mimic other writers as a way to improve my own voice–I think I have already found it–I will, from time to time, pick up a book  I admire and type out a page or two as a method for learning how another author has approached zipping around in the past, handled an intense scene, or slipping a little telling into a fast-paced scene.

Shop Indie Bookstores
A great chick lit book about motherhood.

Reaction Phrases

My instructor, Susan Meier, from my Can This Manuscript Be Saved class had us look for reaction phrases in our work as part of an assignment. Sure we as writers try and make the reactions make sense in things like dialogue. But honestly, I hadn’t really thought of ‘reaction’ as something separate. Something that had the power to affect the whole story’s tone. Even one small word or the way they handle something (reaction) could change your perception of a character. Holy crap, the power of words. Eeek.

Anyway, I have been skimming my manuscript looking for reactions that haven’t fit right. Luckily, I my critique partner has already gone through and pointed out the areas where she wanted to slaughter characters because of…yep, you guessed it, reactions and my word choices. Yikes. Small reactions had made one of my characters into a mean friend that was very unlikeable. Who wants an unlikeable secondary character who is supposed to be a supportive friend–and is mean instead? Yuck. So really, on the grand scale of things, I’ve lucked out in this case. Still, there are the odd places where I have the wrong word or a reaction is just so blah. Or, I’ve used the wrong words to describe something. The nice thing is that by going through and skimming quickly, I don’t give myself a chance to analyze or excuse what I’ve done. I just mark it and move on. Later it will be attended to with an unrelenting eye. (Yikes.)

Right now I am reading Jennifer Weiner’s book Good in Bed. It is a good read and although I get lost in it, at times I pull out and begin critiquing it from a writers perspective, which is a really weird sensation for me–a novice. I feel as though at times there is a focus issue, which isn’t strange at all. I think this was her first book and as agent Joshua Blimes said in his AQ chat the other night, it is a common problem of beginning writers. Still, I love the story and I love the protagonist, Cannie. What makes me bring her up is that she is an AWESOME example of the great use of reaction phrases in regards to creating a fabulous, believable, and very real character.

Cannie is an overweight, heartbroken, pregnant gal. She is talking to her weight loss doctor on the roof of the medical building after she’s decided to keep the baby and drop out of the weight loss program. Anyway, they’re chatting and she’s trying to figure out his sense of humour. He says he is funny. She is in slight doubt. Here’s the reaction that really speaks to Cannie:

“Oh,” he said. “So if you were to describe yourself, you’d say you were funny?”
“No,” I sighed, looking out at the night sky. “At this point, I’d say that I was fucked.”

See? If I had been writing that, I, in all likelihood, would have continued on with the ‘I’m funny’ conversation. Instead, Weiner looked at her character and thought about what reaction would be most true to Cannie and where she was psychologically at that moment and then delivered it.

So, off I go. Checking for reactions. Hopefully, I will have some good reactions like above that really add some punch to the story. And if not, well, maybe I’ll catch them on the next pass!