In Her Shoes: A Novel [Mass Market Paperback]

The Feller sisters are equal but opposite. Maggie is the good-looking, dyslexic little sister who knows how to get anything she wants--but not how to keep it. She "felt as if somewhere between the ages of fourteen and sixteen she'd walked off the edge of a cliff and had been falling ever since." Rose is the plump, practical, responsible older sister who knows about law but not much about her own happiness: "What did she like, besides shoes, and Jim, and foods that were bad for her?" When Maggie's latest eviction lands her in Rose's apartment, and Maggie insults Rose by seducing one of her sister's rare boyfriends, what follows is a chain of events by turns hilarious and heartbreaking. Embarrassed Rose evicts Maggie and begins a work sabbatical leading to a new livelihood and way of living. Maggie flees and runs away to Princeton. Masquerading as a student, she learns to love poetry and saves money for a trip to Miami--and a visit to a long-lost grandmother named Ella who might offer her a last shot at sanctuary. But In Her Shoes, the second novel from Good in Bed author Jennifer Weiner, is about more than the sisters' latest sibling rivalry; Maggie and Rose must sort out the childhood vulnerabilities and family mysteries that still linger two decades after their mother's death. In less capable hands, the plot might grow corny, but Weiner's humor and affection for the characters ultimately helps them transcend both neuroses and grief and learn the redemptive power of love. --Jane Hodges --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Weiner, whose debut novel Good in Bed was an instant bestseller, is back with another exuberantly confident offering. Twenty-eight-year-old Maggie Fuller relies on her looks and size zero body to flirt her way through life while working dozens of dead-end jobs and dreaming of stardom. At the other end of the spectrum is her older, larger sister, Rose, who relies on her intelligence and is an accomplished attorney at a large Philadelphia firm. The only things that these two seem to have in common is their shared history, a loathing for their "stepmonster," Sydelle, size six feet and a passion for luxurious shoes. When Maggie is evicted from her apartment and loses yet another job, Rose takes her in and tries to endure her closet raids and endless insults. But her patience abruptly ends when Maggie crosses a line so sacred that Rose kicks Maggie out and all but terminates their relationship ("Her sister was like a fucking Weebel, [Rose] thought. She'd wobble, she'd screw up, she'd steal your shoes... but she'd absolutely never fall down"). The sisters go on with their lives and Maggie discovers that she has a brain and a will to learn, while Rose learns to loosen up a bit and finds that there is more to life than work. The two sisters also get to know their maternal grandmother, Ella Hirsch, who they haven't seen since their mother's funeral more than 20 years ago. With Ella's love and support, Maggie reaches out to Rose and the two begin to repair their relationship. In the end, these three remarkable women learn that they are stronger than they thought they were, that family ties are worth preserving, and that there are perks to sharing the same shoe size. Weiner, a marvelously natural storyteller, blends humor and heartbreak to create an irresistible novel.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Weiner follows the successful Good in Bed with a wonderful contemporary fairy tale. (Yes, there is a wicked stepmother.) Meet plump, dependable Rose Feller and her gorgeous, out-of-control sister, Maggie. As children, they lost their mother and contact with grandmother Ella. Now, 20 years later, we follow their struggles to forgive the past, reclaim each other's love, and become their best selves. Within a year and a half, all three women, who seemed only to share a shoe size, possess more than they ever dreamed possible. Reworking the age-old theme that self-knowledge and acceptance are needed before love and happiness can be achieved, Weiner embroiders serious matters with threads of humor to produce a novel full of memorable characters and situations. (Every family should have a Mrs. Lefkowitz.) Here's a novel that satisfies on many levels. For most popular fiction collections.
Rebecca Sturm Kelm, Northern Kentucky Univ. Lib., Highland Heights
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Weiner follows up Good in Bed (2001) with this engaging tale of two very different sisters and the grandmother they've been estranged from since their mother's death. Rose Feller is a successful lawyer whose life finally seems to be going right, until her feckless younger sister, Maggie, gets evicted from her apartment and needs a place to stay. Rose reluctantly lets Maggie move in with her. It's a mistake: Maggie steals Rose's shoes, halfheartedly looks for a job, and soon sets her sights on Rose's handsome new boyfriend. While the two sisters' relationship grows more strained, their grandmother, Ella, is trying to get up the nerve to seek them out. After the girls' mother--Ella's daughter, Caroline--died, her husband shut Ella out of their lives. When one of her granddaughters, who is in desperate need of help, contacts her suddenly, Ella sees a chance to finally get to know the girls. But can the rift between Rose and Maggie ever be healed? Weiner's second novel is every bit as enjoyable and moving as her first. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

The Washington Post Irresistible...

Philadelphia Inquirer If chick lit is indeed a genre, Weiner is creating a smarter, funnier subspecies....[She] is a sharp observer of the frustrations of blood ties.

People Like spending time with an understanding friend who has a knack for being great company.

JENNIFER WEINER'S HILARIOUS NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER IS HEADED FOR THE BIG SCREEN. READ IT NOW -- THEN LOOK FOR THE FILM FROM TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX AND THE DIRECTOR OF WONDER BOYS AND L.A. CONFIDENTIAL!

Starring Cameron Diaz, Toni Collette, and Shirley MacLaine

Rose is a thirty-year-old attorney with a secret passion for romance novels. She's going to start exercising next week, and she dreams of a man who will slide off her glasses and tell her she's beautiful. Maggie is twenty-eight and drop-dead gorgeous. Although her stardom hasn't progressed past her hip's appearance in a music video, she dreams of fame and fortune. These two sisters claim to have nothing in common but DNA, a childhood tragedy, and a shoe size, but when they're forced into cohabitation, they may just learn that they're more alike than they thought.

Jennifer Weiner is the author of seven novels: Good in Bed, In Her Shoes, which was made into a major motion picture, Little Earthquakes, Goodnight Nobody, Certain Girls, Best Friends Forever, and Fly Away Home, as well as the short story collection, The Guy Not Taken. A graduate of Princeton University, she lives in Philadelphia with her family. Visit her website at www.jenniferweiner.com.

In Her Shoes

one

"Baby," groaned the guy -- Ted? Tad? -- something like that -- and crushed his lips against the side of her neck, shoving her face against the wall of the toilet stall.

This is ridiculous, Maggie thought, as she felt him bunching her dress up around her hips. But she'd had five vodka-and-tonics over the course of the last hour and a half, and at this point was not in much of a position to call anything ridiculous. She wasn't even sure she could pronounce the word.

"You're so hot!" Ted or Tad exclaimed, discovering the thong that Maggie had purchased for the occasion.

"I want the thong. In red," she'd said.

"Flame," the salesgirl at Victoria's Secret had replied.

"Whatever," said Maggie. "Small," she added, "extra small if you have it." She gave the girl a quick scornful look to let her know that while she might not know red from flame, she, Maggie Feller, was not worried. She might not have finished college. She might not have a great job-or, okay, after last Thursday, any job at all. The sum total of her big-screen experience might be the three seconds that a sliver of her left hip was visible in Will Smith's second-to-last video. And she might be just barely bumping along while some people, like namely her sister, Rose, went whizzing through Ivy League colleges and straight into law schools, then into law firms and luxury apartments on Rittenhouse Square like they'd been shot down the water slide of life, but still, she, Maggie, had something of worth, something rare and precious, possessed by few, coveted by many-a terrific body. One hundred and six pounds stretched over five feet and six inches, all of it tanning-bed basted, toned, plucked, waxed, moisturized, deodorized, perfumed, perfect.

She had a tattoo of a daisy on the small of her back, the words "BORN TO BE BAD" tattooed around her left ankle, and a plump, pierced red heart reading "MOTHER" on her right bicep. (She'd thought about adding the date of her mother's death, but for some reason that tattoo had hurt more than the other two put together.) Maggie also had D-cup tits. Said tits had been a gift from a married boyfriend and were made of saline and plastic, but this didn't matter. "They're an investment in my future," Maggie had said, even as her father looked hurt and bewildered, and Sydelle the Stepmonster flared her nostrils, and her big sister, Rose, had asked, "Precisely what kind of future are you planning?" in that snotty voice of hers that made her sound like she was seventy instead of thirty. Maggie didn't listen. Maggie didn't care. She was twenty-eight years old now, at her tenth high school reunion, and she was the best-looking girl in the room.

All eyes had been on her as she strolled into the Cherry Hill Hilton in her clinging black spaghetti-strap cocktail dress and the Christian Louboutin stilettos she'd swiped from her sister's closet the weekend before. Rose might have let herself turn into a fat load -- a big sister in more ways than one -- but at least their feet were still the same size. Maggie could feel the heat of the gazes as she smiled, sashaying over to the bar, hips swaying like music, bangles chiming on her wrists, letting her former classmates get a good look at what they'd missed -- the girl they'd ignored, or mocked and called retarded, the one who'd shuffled down the high school hallways swimming in her father's oversized army jacket, cringing against the lockers. Well, Maggie had blossomed. Let them see, let them drool. Marissa Nussbaum and Kim Pratt and especially that bitch Samantha Bailey with her dishwater-blond hair and the fifteen pounds she'd packed on her hips since high school. All the cheerleaders, the ones who'd scorned her or looked right past her. Looked right through her. Let them just feast their eyes on her now or, better yet, let their wimpy, receding-hairlined husbands do the feasting.

"Oh, God!" moaned Ted the Tadpole, unbuckling his pants.

In the next stall, a toilet flushed.

Maggie wobbled on her heels as Ted-slash-Tad aimed and missed and aimed again, jabbing at her thighs and backside. It was like being bludgeoned with a blind snake, she thought, and snorted to herself, a noise that Ted evidently mistook for a groan of passion. "Oh, yeah, baby! You like that, huh?" he groaned, and started poking her even harder. Maggie stifled a yawn and looked down at herself, noting with pleasure that her thighs -- firmed from hours on the treadmill, smooth as plastic from a recent waxing -- did not so much as quiver, no matter how violent Ted's thrusts got. And her pedicure was perfect. She -- hadn't been sure about this particular shade of red -- not quite dark enough, she'd worried -- but it was the right choice, she thought, as she looked down at her toes, gleaming back up at her.

"Jesus CHRIST!" yelled Ted. His tone was one of commingled ecstasy and frustration, like a man who's seen a holy vision and isn't quite sure what it means. Maggie had met him at the bar, maybe half an hour after she'd arrived, and he was just what she had in mind -- tall, blond, built, not fat and balding like all the guys who'd been football gods and prom kings in high school. Smooth, too. He'd tipped the bartender five dollars for each round, even though it was an open bar, even though he didn't have to, and he'd told her what she wanted to hear.

"What do you do?" he'd asked, and she'd smiled at him. "I am a performer," she said. Which was true. For the past six months, she'd been a backup singer for a band called Whiskered Biscuit that did thrash-metal covers of 1970s disco classics. So far, they'd booked precisely one gig, as the market for thrash-metal renditions of "MacArthur Park" was not overwhelming, and Maggie knew that she was in the band only because the lead singer was hoping she'd sleep with him. But it was something -- a tiny toehold on her dream of being famous, of being a star.

"You weren't in any of my classes," he'd said, tracing his forefinger around and around her wrist. "I would have remembered you for sure." Maggie looked down, toying with one of her auburn ringlets, debating whether she should slide her sandal along his calf, or unpin her hair, letting her curls cascade down her back. No, she hadn't been in his classes. She'd been in the "special" classes, the "remedial" classes, the classes with the scrubs and the burnouts and the big-print textbooks that were a different shape -- slightly longer and thinner -- than any of the books the other kids carried. You could tuck those books under brown paper covers and shove them in your backpack, but the other kids always knew. Well, fuck them. Fuck all of them. Fuck all the pretty cheerleaders and the guys who'd been happy to fool around with her in the passenger seat of their parents' cars but wouldn't even say "Hi" to her in the halls the next Monday.

"Christ!" yelled Ted again. Maggie opened her mouth to tell him to keep it down, and threw up all over the floor -- a clear spill of vodka and tonic, she noted as if from a great distance, plus a few decomposing noodles. She'd had pasta when? Last night? She was trying to remember her last meal when he grabbed her hips and swung her around roughly so that she was facing the front of the stall, banging her hip against the toilet-paper dispenser in the process. "AGHH!" Ted announced, and came all over her back.

Maggie whirled to face him, moving as quickly as she could through the sloshing vodka/noodle mess on the floor. "Not the dress!" she said. And Ted stood there, blinking, his pants puddled around his knees, his hand still on his dick. He grinned foolishly at her. "That was great!" he said, and squinted at her face. "What was your name again?"

Fifteen miles away, Rose Feller had a secret -- a secret currently splayed flat on his back and snoring, a secret who had somehow managed to dislodge her fitted sheet and kick three pillows to the floor.

Rose propped herself up on her elbow and considered her lover by the glow of the streetlights that filtered through her blinds, smiling a sweet, secret smile, a smile none of her colleagues at the law firm of Lewis, Dommel, and Fenick would have recognized. This was what she had always wanted, what she'd spent her whole life secretly dreaming of -- a man who looked at her like she was the only woman in the room, in the world, the only woman who'd ever existed. And he was so handsome, even better looking without his clothes than in them. She wondered if she could take a picture. But the noise would wake him up. And who could she show it to?

Instead, Rose let her eyes take a tour of his body -- his strong legs, his broad shoulders, his mouth, half-open, the better to snore with. Rose turned on her side, away from him, drew up the blanket tight under her chin, and smiled, remembering.

They'd been working late on the Veeder matter, which was so boring that Rose could have wept, except the partner on the case was Jim Danvers, and she was so in love with him that she would have spent a week reviewing documents if it meant she'd be close enough to him to smell the good wool of his suit, the scent of his cologne. It got to be eight-o'clock, and then it got to be nine, and finally they sealed the last of the pages into the messenger's pouch and he looked at her with his movie-star smile and said, "Do you want to get a bite to eat?"

They went to the bar in the basement of Le Bec-Fin, where a glass of wine turned into a bottle, where the crowd dwindled and the candles burned down until it was midnight and they were alone and the conversation stuttered to a stop. While Rose was trying to figure out what to say next -- something about sports maybe? -- Jim reached for her hand and murmured, "Do you have any idea how beautiful you are?" Rose shook her head because, really, she had no idea. Nobody had ever told her she was beautiful, except her father, once, and that didn't really count. When she looked in the mirror, she saw nothing but an ordinary girl, a plain Jane, a grown-up bookworm with a decent wardrobe -- size fourteen, brown hair and brown ...

It's hard to imagine two sisters more different than 30-year-old Rose Feller and her 28-year-old sister, Maggie. But as both embark on a journey of self-discovery, they learn they have more in common than they ever realized. Karen Ziemba's effortless narration of these two distinct characters aids in making this witty and poignant audiobook all the more realistic. There are moments that her thoughtful pacing causes a scene to drag, but this is forgivable, considering the excellent quality of her reading overall. IN HER SHOES is a fine audiobook for Weiner fans, as well as anyone who knows the struggle of stepping out from behind a sibling's shadow. R.A.P. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.