Good in Bed, Jennifer Weiner

It’s a chick lit. It’s up to you if you’d take it as a compliment, but for me, it’s a disappointment.

It was the ‘chick lit’ and being the author of ‘In Her Shoes’ and the humor that the reviews have been saying that made me buy the book. Contrary to the entertainment and the laugh-out-loud experience that I was expecting from the book, I find it as a chore to finish it, especially when I asked it as a ‘pasalubong’ from my Uncle who’s based in the States. But I have to admit that there’s a part in the book where her humor effected on me. It’s where she said that she dreamed that both of her breasts were rolling away from her due to the pain she was experiencing being pregnant. The rest of her humor, however, was hard to understand and I guess wasn’t a ‘universal’ one.

Another, I don’t know if the author wants to make an impression from the readers to have mastered vocabularies from the dictionary. She has this thing on using deep synonyms than using words that are easy to understand. Along with the chore of finishing the book, I also had to bring a dictionary with me in order to understand words I’ve never encountered before.

It was a surprise to me that the book talked less on the romantic part, which was the first thing I want from a chick lit, and talked more the issue of being a larger woman. The main character, Candace or Cannie Shapiro, was also a pathetic one during the climax. Giving a premature birth to her daughter served as the character’s turning point, but she chose to face it the rueful way, doing beyond normal activities. The author, I guess, wanted to appeal to pity from the readers, wanted to make the readers say their ‘awwws’ and cry. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the effect on a stone-hearted reader like me (sarcastic)!