Fly Away Home

By Jennifer Weiner
Published by Atria Books
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
July 2010

Jennifer Weiner has always written good books; I've read them all. But with last year's "Best Friends Forever" and now her latest novel, "Fly Away Home", Weiner seems to have taken on a new maturity and complexity in her writing. While previous novels seemed to centre around one main character, "Fly Away Home" is about a family, each character given an equal story, each story drawing the reader into the family.

US politicians cheating on their wives makes for a good story in real life and it makes for an excellent story here. What does a fifty-something wife do with this kind of news after she has spent her entire married life devoted to her husband, furthering his political ambitions? What do you do when your duties as a wife outweighed your duties as a mother - your every waking hour being consumed by life as a senator's spouse - and now you've been replaced by a younger version of you?

When Richard Woodruff's family finds out about his "transgression" each member embarks on a life-changing journey of their own. Wife Sylvie retreats to her childhood summer home in Connecticut; married daughter Diana, an ER physician, has to come to grips with her own affair with a med student; and single daughter Lizzie, having just come out of rehab, has to adjust to life without drugs or alcohol.

While each character's story is compelling, the minor players in the book bring out Weiner's comedic side - Gary, mouth-breathing husband of Diana; acerbic-tongued retired judge Selma, Sylvie's mother; and Sylvie's best friend, Ceil, round out the characters and make the book a little less serious.

This book has intrigued me more than any other Weiner has written. It's serious and funny, heart-breaking and loving. It's based on what we hear in the news, but brings us where the news never goes, which is into the heart of a family on the verge of splitting apart. "Fly Away Home" is Weiner's best novel yet.

Nice Recovery

By Susan Juby
Published by Penguin Group (Canada)
First published March 2010

"Nice Recovery" is Susan Juby's memoir of her addictions. Beginning at age fourteen, Juby embarks on a young-adult journey into alcoholism, shoplifting, fist-fighting, drugs, and smoking (as opposed to her previous life of reading, dressage, and being a typical pre-teen misfit). She tells her story with what appears to me to be a lot of truth and without a lot of holding back; when she was bad, she was bad. I enjoy her writing style and knew I would like her when I read these lines in the preface:

"If telling these stories about addiction and recovery helps one person, it will have been worth it. Just please don't sic the accuracy police on me. I've done the best I can with the tattered remnants of my abused memory. I remember enough."

Juby writes of very bad times indeed - drunken blackouts, being beaten, waking up in strange places, being kicked out of college. But she tempers the seriousness of her life with a finely-placed sense of humour, letting us laugh without losing sight of how crap her life actually was.

Where she did lose me, though, was at Part III. This is where Juby stops sharing her life (the memoir) and starts writing an entirely different book on how treatment centres work and how AA and NA meetings are run. All good information, I'm sure, but I didn't want to read it - I wanted to read more of Juby's life and recovery.

All in all, however, a well-written, revealing memoir.