“Certain Girls is the story of Cannie Shapiro and her daughter Joy. At 42 years old, Cannie has finally gotten her life together. She’s enjoyed over a decade of marriage with Peter, a successful doctor who sees beyond her large size and adores her quirky, intelligent wit and unconventional beauty. She’s nurtured a beautiful, happy, top-of-her-class, 13-year-old daughter, Joy. She’s exorcised the mistakes, tribulations, and poor relationships of her past in a best-selling novel, and then let it go. The success of that novel has now allowed her the freedom to write under a pseudonym. Instead of confessing her painful personal failures, now she assumes the identity of a science fiction writer and chronicles the adventures of a beautiful and irrepressible heroin who leaps between planets to save the day with spunk and pizzazz. Cannie has gained such control over her life, that she has even allowed Joy’s father—the man who abandoned Cannie after learning she was pregnant with Joy—into Joy’s life. Everything is working out just fine.
And then Cannie is broadsided. First, Peter tells her he’d like them to bring another child into their lives. Then she observes with confusion as her daughter begins to find flaws in herself, her mother, her home, her mother’s past, and just about everything else that could possibly trouble a teenager struggling to find a place in the world apart from her family. Joy begins to collect secrets, transition to the popular crowd, worship the antics of her irresponsible but fashionable aunt, and—especially—actively hate her mother for downplaying the social significance of her upcoming bat mitzvah in order to honor the spiritual meaning of the event.
To Joy, life is anything but joyful in the Shapiro-Krushelevansky household. In fact, it’s almost unbearable. In an effort to exert her own growing need to define herself, she sets out on a series of disastrous journeys. In the meantime, Connie is hit by the brutal realization that she can no longer protect her little girl from the darker side of the world. She tries to connect and protect her daughter, further alienating herself each time. And so, as Joy experiences loss and devastation first-hand and her bat mitzvah looms ever nearer, we observe a young woman alternating between the sweet innocence and naivety of her youth and the blossoming maturity her mother isn’t quite ready to handle. This lovely book by Jennifer Weiner is a wise and delightful exploration of the tight rope that every parent of a teenager must traverse. The story is simple and all but the two primary characters are two-dimensional, but the close-up of this special, changing, stinging relationship between mother and daughter is a gem.”