Good in Bed by Jennifer Weiner

Good in Bed by Jennifer Weiner
Series: Cannie Shapiro, #1
Source: Bought
Publisher: Washington Square Press
Publication Date: April 2, 2002

For twenty-eight years, things have been tripping along nicely for Cannie Shapiro. Sure, her mother has come charging out of the closet, and her father has long since dropped out of her world. But she loves her friends, her rat terrier, Nifkin, and her job as pop culture reporter for The Philadelphia Examiner. She's even made a tenuous peace with her plus-size body.

But the day she opens up a national women's magazine and sees the words "Loving a Larger Woman" above her ex-boyfriend's byline, Cannie is plunged into misery...and the most amazing year of her life. From Philadelphia to Hollywood and back home again, she charts a new course for herself: mourning her losses, facing her past, and figuring out who she is and who she can become.

I'm going to start off by saying that I've been in a chick lit mood lately - and Good in Bed didn't satisfy my needs. It just made me want to read more and more, because it was exactly the sweet, fluffy bit of literature that I was looking for. Cannie was the perfect heroine for me - I immediately identified with her. She's a larger girl, just going through life like the rest of us, and that made her very easy to like.

She was very sassy and sarcastic, which I just adored. But she didn't have that prickly outer shell that some main characters tend to have - she was still very sweet in my opinion. To be honest, I'd recommend this book to fans of Bridget Jones' Diary, because that's what it reminded me of. Cannie and Bridget have very similar personalities, and they live similarly. I loved Cannie's fight to lose weight, and her regular girl thoughts of lost love, paired with the horror of the magazine article, it was quite a wild (if sort of tame and fluffy) ride.

Good in Bed was written in a very humorous style, with several over-dramatizations and a lot of humorous hijinks - and some not so humorous as well. It has every level of drama, from not-that-bad to crazy-bad and it always kept me on my toes. At any point something could happen, and I didn't want to miss any of it.

Speaking of something happening - I just hoped and prayed for a love connection between Cannie and the doctor. There just had to be something there, you know? They seemed to have fabulous chemistry and I found him to be very kind and wise - the perfect traits for a women like Cannie. He was solid, something that I really felt that she needed.

But let me be clear here - a man did not save Cannie Shapiro.

Cannie Shapiro saved herself. I loved the feel-good empowerment of the ending. There was so much "love yourself" vibes coming from the end article that it could have only been a great ending. It may have been fluffy, and a little bit mushy, but I enjoyed Good in Bed immensely.