Rating: 
Summary: Queen for a Day
Review: A lady I work with told me this was a great read. I was hesitate at first because of the title.. but she assured me it wasn't "that type of book". I loved the character of Candace. What a witty comical character! (Talk about comical - her dog's name is Nifken.) She always knows the right thing to say at the right time. Candace's exboyfriend, Bruce, writes a column for a new woman's magazine. His article "Good in Bed" catches her by surprise. It's an article about loving a larger woman. That sets the scene for the weight issue she faces. But her weight is not the only issue she has to face. Her mother announces she's gay, her exboyfriend's father dies, she becomes pregnant by accident, sells a script and goes to Hollywood, finds her emotionally abusive father working as a plastic surgeon to the stars, gets into a push and shove with her exboyfriend's new girlfriend, and eventually figures out that Mr. Right was there waiting on her to notice him. It's a Bridget Jones meets Cinderella story.
Rating: 
Summary: Truly awful
Review: This is a miserable excuse for a novel. Good beach reading or maybe a small step up from romance novels, but precious little else. It is obvious from the first 50 pages that the author clearly has both talent and also something original to say about living as a plus-size person in an unforgiving world. Unfortunately, the book goes horribly wrong after this and soon degenerates into an 8th grade fantasy. Don't waste your time.
Rating: 
Summary: I kept waiting for Mr. Big to show up...
Review: If you read a lot, you'll want to avoid this book. If, on the other hand, you usually loathe reading, or are young (very young), have never read a book, or have never been exposed to a sitcom, you just might enjoy this. Let this review be a warning, then, to people like me: reasonably educated 20-somethings wondering just what this 'Chick Lit' phenomenon is all about. People who maybe wondered, as I did, what the need was, when literature already overflows with so many talented female writers (known simply as 'authors' and not 'women authors'), for a new genre that includes the word 'chick'. After a little research I'm certain it is nothing but a cynical marketing ploy that aims to separate insecure women from their cash.
Things are dubious from the get-go. The cover quotes a review that refers to Good in Bed as a "beach book", as if that is a favorable response from a critic. After the first few pages it is clear that this is a work whose thin themes, plot and dialogue are reconstructed from various movies and sitcoms, particularly such highbrow fare as Friends and Sex in the City. Here we have the tall, frank, and sexy best friend named Samantha, the doubtful but hip protagonist named Carrie--oh wait, it's actually 'Cannie'. But you get what I'm saying. I kept waiting for Mr. Big to show up, but he never did. At least not in the first third of the book, which was all I could stomach. For the most part Good in Bed reminded me of those countless straight to video Matrix rip-offs you see in Blockbuster, the movies whose covers also feature green graphics and whose titles are presented in the same 'Matrix' font as if they hope to fool us. This book was similar in that it seems to be a rip-off, or maybe more kindly, a 'novelization' of everything on TV. The situations, the jokes, the 'wit' so many reivewers mention here were lame and second hand and made me wonder why anyone would seek this experience from a book.
"But what about the writing?" one might ask. It's true this set-up may have worked from any of the 'postmodern' writers who couch the experience in some sort of baroque and wondrous prose. But that's not the case here. Page after page is filled with so many examples of what is commonly identified as 'bad writing' by any instructor; was there an editor involved, I wondered, or did they just rush the manuscript into print and wait for the cash to pour in? At least it was mildly satisfying to be able to hand Good in Bed to some friends from my undergrad creative writing class and say "Hey look: you *can* write completely obvious and uninspired sentimental story that prattles on and on without much of the traditional concerns and make heaps of dough!"...but you know, unless you're in a similar situation, you probably want to skip this one.
For anyone reading this review who did enjoy Good in Bed I recommend maybe picking up some short stories by Jennifer Egan or perhaps the Dave Eggers-edited Best Non-Required Reading of 2002; there you're sure to find some stuff written by women (and I guess for women to a certain extent) that shares the same concerns but that is much more satisfying from every angle.
Rating: 
Summary: Light yet Addictive
Review: Cannie is truly a character everyone can relate to. She's real, she's fat and she's struggling with so much on her plate. I don't want to spoil the ending but I got to say that Peter is the best match for her. Let Bruce smoke up all his weed and miss out on what a fanatastic human being Cannie is!
Rating:
Summary: not what I thought
Review: I usually check out the "Customers who bought this list" to find things similar to books I have read and like. This is nothing like any of the oother books on that liskt other than it si about a women. It was horribly depressing and the ending didn't make up for the sadness of the rest of the book. I had a couple of cute parts but not enough for me to suggest it. I love Jane Greene and this is nothing like any of her books.(thank god I bought it on sale)
Rating:
Summary: If you love real life nuances...you'll love this...
Review: Although this book had a somewhat slow start, I found it to be funny, interesting and eventually hard to put down. The real-life experiences are hillarious and so right on target that it sometimes reminded me of my own life. It was a full circle of love, loss, love and self-awareness healing. Cannie is a down-to-earth character that embodies traits of every single young woman looking for love while dealing with self-acceptance issues and body image stereotypes. When she truly finds love it's right in front of her eyes and she ignors it - shoos it away and slams the door on it. What makes this book so good is that the author, Jennifer Weiner, doesn't reveal the ending within the story. I love to read a book without knowing how it will end. Some stories you can tell by the 3rd chapter or half way through, but not this one, it keeps you hanging on til the end. I highly recommend it for fun summer reading!
Rating:
Summary: PU-LEEZE
Review: This was perhaps my fifth book in chick-lit education, and I have to give it a D. Maybe because I'm sick of graduates in English (and BTW, Proust was not an English writer) or media studies thinking they can write a first person narrative loosely based on their own experiences and substitute pseudo-smart observations for plot, and then call it fiction. Ironically, I got into this novel quicker than other novels of its ilk, but "Good in Bed" (misleading title) lost me forever at page 105. I can't take being inside the head of a mean-spirited, self-absorbed individual anymore, no matter how much I might sympathize with her fatness. Does being fat give you a right to bad manners? Cannie publicly humiliates a man who asks her out for dinner as soon as she finds out it is not a "date." She is nasty and belligerant to the nurse at the diet clinic. The author (via her character) takes pains to illustrate the injustice of the generalizations and labeling that overweight people are subjected to, and then goes into a spurious and irrelevant spiel about how she doesn't like Celine Dion, her singing, looks or lifestyle, and Canadians in general, it seems. The novel loses all direction after page 60, going off into unedited ramblings, which are less than humorous. Where were the editors? Much of the text should have been excised. The name of a restaurant even changed in the space of one page. I hate it when I'm so blatantly thrown out of a story because of careless editing. Judging by the author's photo, Jennifer Weiner looks like a nice person, but the book lives up to her name.
Rating:
Summary: Great debut!
Review: Cannie Shapiro is a character that every woman can relate to in one way or another. I loved the fact that a larger woman was the focus (and not the comic relief) of this book. I found myself laughing out loud at some of the situations that only Cannie could find herself in. This book will pull all of your strings. You will: cringe in embarrassment for her, cry with her, rage with her, roll your eyes at her mother, feel like shaking Bruce until his ponytail falls off, and most of all you will love her. Unlike the a lot of "curvy women" books, Cannie doesn't miraculously lose all of her excess weight and become supermodel extraordinaire. She does, through a series of tragedies obtain thiness, but finds the price too high to pay. She eventually gains most of her weight back and it is a good thing. If you have ever been made fun of, belittled or felt that you didn't belong you will feel a kinship with Cannie Shapiro.
Rating:
Summary: What a good book!
Review: I loved this book, I think that any woman can relate to this book and probably at some point in her life relate to one or many of these issues! It was a quick read and hard to put down, you always wanted to know what would happen next.
Rating:
Summary: Great read for the beach this summer!!!
Review: Once I started to read this book I could not put it down. It is a "feel good" book that almost any woman can relate to.
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