November 3

My Husband's Sweethearts by Bridget Asher
This was an interesting plot line.  A woman who's husband cheated on her returns home to take care of him as he is suffering from a terminal illness.  The first night she returns home she drinks too much and decides she shouldn't have to do this alone and calls all his ex girlfriends to let them know he is dying and they need to come help too.  It's a really funny first few chapters as the mess gets sorted out but some of the exes do show up to say their goodbyes and get their closure.  Which leads to lots of stories along the way of both ways that the husband helped and hindered their lives.  The woman also realizes her husband has a grown son whom she and he have never met but that he has been sending money to all his life.  He now as part of his dying wish wants to meet this son.  I liked the unique story line which is what originally draw me to this light hearted book, but I didn't like the romance novel turn it took very quickly and predictably.  Overall though it was an easy quick read with lots of laughs.

Some quotes I liked from the book:  "There is a blurry line between love and hate."  "Sometimes it's hard to figure out what happens when your eyes are wide open."  "...because women know how to survive.  It's what we do.  We have more inner strength, and all those years that men thought they were superior, it wasn't true.  It was something we allowed them to believe, because they're weak.  And then women's lib came along- and don't get me wrong, I love women's lib- but they messed up the whole charade."  "Well, they say I tried to fix them or change them and that I made a promise to them, and the promise is what would make their lives better.  The promises made them feel, well, safe, for example.  And when I failed them or betrayed them, they ended up with two problems instead of one or I made the one problem worse.  It's always complicated." "We are the stories we tell and stories we don't tell."  "The difference between breaking down and breaking open is sometimes so slight it's imperceptible."  "And sometimes you can be brought back to yourself, whole"

Commencement by J. Courtney Sullivan

This is a story of four women who met in college and what happens after graduation as they move forward into the "real world."  It was an interesting story, with each chapter switching between one of the four main characters as narrators.  The women are all very different and I'm not certain if they would have become friends anywhere other then in a fictional world.  But perhaps just having a small all female college in common is enough to form a bond even among unlike characters.  Throughout the book even as the characters have less and less in common as they mature into adults, they still stick by their original friendships.  Through weddings and pregnancies and major life events we get to go back in the past and see how the friendships formed and we also see in the present how "bonded for life" the women are.

Some quotes I liked from the book: "With the Smithies, it was different.  There was sometimes no telling where one of them began and the others left off."
"Sometimes April worried that she'd been built without some fundamental piece that everyone else had that just let them deal... But the evil in the world, everywhere you looked, was always on April's mind"
"They recognized that they were the first generation of women whose struggle with choice had nothing to do with getting it and everything to do with having too much of it- there were so many options that it felt impossible and exhausting to pick the right ones."
"It amazed her how chemical a feeling love could be, how it could take hold of you even when you had come to despise its object."

Where We Belong by Emily Giffin

This is the story of a woman in her mid 30s with a great career but still working on her love life.  And the story of an almost 18 year old woman trying to figure out where she came from.  The older woman has kept a secret from everyone in her life, except her mother, about having a child and giving that child away in her teens.  Needless to say the 18 year old turns out to be her daughter and the story goes back and forth between the two women as narrators sharing their unique coming of age stories.  I liked the mostly realistic story line of the this novel and the focus on the two main female characters.  I didn't like some of the romance novelish stuff that got thrown in towards the end.  Overall though I think the author did a good job sharing a storyline that hasn't been explored that much.  I've read a lot of non-fiction on adoption stories and seen a bit on finding birth parents later in life, but this fictionalized story brought out real emotion in a fictional setting.