Jennifer Weiner, BEST FRIENDS FOREVER: I used to know you when we were young

From the day they found out they were living next door to each other, Valerie and Addie were inseparable... until senior year in high school, when something happened. The glamorous cheerleader and the dumpy outcast hadn't had much in common before something happened, but after that, they barely spoke. Now Val's a local weather anchor with her face on billboards and Addie's a lonely single artist who still lives in her dead parents' house. Thanksgiving weekend, Val leaves their high school reunion to find Addie, because she's the only one she can trust.

There's always a whoosh of disappointment when an author you generally like delivers something not up to her game. After tearing through Weiner's last book in record fashion, I struggled to even finish this one, which felt in a lot of places derivative of her other books. Addie goes through the same transformation as the heroine of GOOD IN BED, but in a manner that the book builds up to like it's going to be a huge surprise what happens to her, and it's not; in a B-plot, the local police officer takes an undue interest in where the missing man is, which is like GOODNIGHT NOBODY but feels contrived. There is a getaway of sorts, just like in IN HER SHOES but not as resonant, and like CERTAIN GIRLS, there is a last-10-pages-twist that made me feel only vaguely pissed that I hadn't guessed it beforehand. With the something that happened I didn't even get to that level of outrage; it's hinted at so predictably at the beginning, and approximately every 15 minutes thereafter that the revelation is rendered completely pointless.

I might have been able to overlook all those flaws, though, if the central relationship had been better fleshed out. Starting from two people who used to be very close and then had a falling out is an emotional gold mine, particularly when it's rooted in adolescence. You could write a million novels from that place and each one would be different. But since Addie narrates most chapters, and Val doesn't at all, I never bought that Val would seek her out for help, nor that she wasn't just using her for her own purposes. At some point, and this isn't really a spoiler, you are asked to trust that their old bonds are strong enough to be reactivated in a time of trouble, and I couldn't make that leap.

I don't think Weiner is going to start repeating herself; maybe this one just wasn't for me. I'm passing it on to my mom, who went on a tear with her books earlier this year (P.S. it rhymes with whiner, not... yeah) and want to see if she notices the resemblance.