Then Came You

May 16, 2011
Weiner (Best Friends Forever) revisits girls-are-their-own-best-friends territory with this savvy tale of a profoundly unorthodox family, unspooling the impossibly complicated and hopeful tale of how baby Aurora was born. The players: beautiful, lonely Princeton student and egg donor Jules, who uses the proceeds from selling her eggs to help save her drug-addled dad; surrogate Annie, a restless married mom-of-two trying to dig her way out of debt, a lifelong rivalry with her successful sister, and a marital rut; Bettina, India's step-daughter, who feels betrayed by her divorced parents and is desperate to rebuild the imagined happiness of her youth; and Aurora's legal mom, India, a gold digger who inadvertently falls in love with the man she married for money. Their individual paths to each other, and Aurora, are related in alternating chapters narrated by each woman, told with equal parts love and longingâwhether it be for a partner, a purpose, or a family. The men in their livesâin Jules's case, the womanâare inexplicably forgiving and disappointingly superfluous as the gals build a network and a modern village to raise the baby each of whom had a hand in creating.

June 1, 2011

Four women confront the quandaries surrounding modern motherhood, in Weiner's fraught latest (In Her Shoes, 2002, etc.).

The four narrators of this cautionary tale of motherhood wouldn't be where they are without serious parenting issues. Trust-fund baby Bettina's father, Marcus, a Wall Street kingpin, was so devastated when her mother decamped to Taos to follow a guru, that he fell prey to an airbrushed gold-digger, India, who, Bettina believes, not only tricked him into marriage but into reproducing by surrogacy. Jules, a work-study student at Princeton, becomes an egg donor to earn enough to put her father, a formerly respectable high-school teacher whose career and marriage exploded after a drunken vehicular felony, through rehab. Annie, happily married, still anguishes over the expense of raising two rambunctious boys and maintaining a ramshackle family farmhouse on her husband's Frank's salary as a TSA officer. To replenish the family coffers, Frank reluctantly agrees to let her become a surrogate mother—very reluctantly, it turns out. India, abandoned by her own mother, fled to Hollywood from Connecticut at 18. Failing to take Hollywood by storm, she reinvented herself as a publicist, shedding years and pounds with the aid of false documents and surgical enhancements. At 37, India, a rising Manhattan PR star, ensnares Marcus by helping him order coffee at Starbucks. Bettina hires a detective, discovering India's real age (43) and other truths so shocking that they cannot be revealed until the end of the novel. Nonetheless, her brothers and her laid-back Buddhist mother refuse to help her dislodge India—there's plenty of money to go around, after all. Besides, could that unfamiliar discomfiture Bettina is experiencing be sympathy for her stepmother? And could India actually be factoring love into her calculations of Marcus' net worth? 

The conflicts enmeshing all these characters, as each becomes embroiled in Marcus and India's "assisted gestation" scheme, are gripping, and Weiner's elucidation of socio-economic determinism is as sharp as ever. However, the ending does not so much jump the shark as de-fang it.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

February 15, 2011

Certainly a hot topic: Princeton senior Jules Wildgren needs money to help her father clean up his addiction, working-class mom Annie Barrow needs money just to live, and India Bishop needs Jules's eggs and Annie's womb because she can't conceive. Then India's much older husband dies, leaving his daughter as guardian of the unborn babe. So what does it really mean to be a mom? A ten-city tour and book club materials; bound to do well.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2011
Weiner's latest outing chronicles the plight of four women who are brought together when one of them decides to have a baby. At 43, India knows her hopes of having a child naturally are slim, and the in vitro fertilization she and her older, wealthy husband, Marcus, have been trying isn't working. So India and Marcus decide to go another route: they select an egg from a donor and choose a surrogate to carry the baby. Weiner introduces us to both: Jules is a stunning college student who decides to donate her eggs so she can pay for her father to go to rehab, and Annie, a young mother of two, chooses to become a surrogate to help support her family. The only one not happy with India's plan is Bettina, Marcus' adult daughter, who is secretly hoping her parents will reunite. In this warm and winning yarn, Weiner draws readers into the lives of each woman, and brings them together in an unexpected and ultimately rewarding way. Another surefire hit for the popular author of Fly Away Home (2010). HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Best-selling Weiner has an avid and active fan base, and Internet buzz is growing about her new book and many plannedsummer appearances.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)