For the Love of Lit

Jennifer Weiner is one of my favorite chick lit authors, not to mention one of my favorite authors, period.  I couldn’t wait to read her newest book when it came out recently!

“Fly Away Home” is about a high-powered New York City family – Richard, Sylvie, and daughters Diana and Lizzie.  Richard is a State Senator who (“ripped from the headlines”!) gets caught having an affair with an intern then admits to helping her get a job.  When Sylvie, his dedicated and loyal wife of many years, finds out, she can’t bear to be with him any longer.  She realizes that she has molded herself to fit in as a politician’s wife and is sick of the act.  She flees to her family’s house by the beach where she spent so much time growing up.  She sheds the designer skirt suits, Spanx, and hair straightening to revert back to her wavy hair, comfy clothes, and no-makeup-ed face.

At this same time, Richard and Sylvie’s oldest daughter, Diana, a married mother of one and an emergency department physician, is in the middle of a heated love affair with a younger med student at the hospital.  She admits that she had “arranged” her own married and never really loved her husband but decided to marry him because he cared for her and she didn’t think he would ever hurt her and she thought she would grow to love him.  During this time, Diana’s younger sister, Lizzie, gets released from rehab for drug and alcohol use and moves in with Diana to be the nanny to her son.

When things start to go wrong for both of the girls, they also retreat to the beach house with their mother.  Sylvie, by the way, is having the time of her life being independent, learning how to cook, and doing things that she was never able to do as the wife of a prominent politician.

The story doesn’t end there, but you’ll just have to go out and buy it if you want to know what I left out!  I really really liked this book – each chapter was told in the perspective of one of the female characters, Sylvie, Diana, or Lizzie, but never Richard.  I like when an author does something interesting like that to mix it up a little bit.  I enjoyed the characters as well because they were all so different and had their ups and downs at different points in the book.

Jennifer Weiner has written six other books, all of which I own and loved.  You may recognize her one title, “In Her Shoes“, which was made into a movie a few years ago starring Cameron Diaz and Toni Collette (which by the way was not as good as the actual book – if you’ve seen the movie but not read the book yet, please go out and read it!).