Two more books read

I just finished Good Grief and Stone Garden this week.

Good Grief made me laugh because Michelle has a link on her site to Jennifer Weiner's site and at one point the cover art for Good Grief was supposed to be for one of Jennifer's books. But the book was pretty good. A woman in her mid 30's loses her relatively new (3 years) husband to cancer and has to learn to cope. I liked it. Some things were a little too pat for me, but you want a happy ending and all that. Some of it was hysterical as hell. I can't imagine how crazy that kind of thing would make me, but I could see myself falling to pieces as badly as Sophie did.

I was really on the fence about Stone Garden, but kept reading. I think I was on the fence because of the whole 'soul mate' concept. A senior in high school finds out that her best friend since kindergarten, 'soul mate', has been murdered. She too goes off the deep end. (What the hell was I thinking when I checked out these books? I had the murdered woman, the cancered husband and then the murdered teenager. And every one of them made me cry although that's not a shock.) She is really trying to cope with the loss of her best friend and the guy she really loved. The one part that required too much of a suspension of belief was that she was doing her senior project at a prison, teaching writing. She really spent a lot of time with the prisoners and I wonder, especially since they were murders mostly, how unlikely was that. Because really, not so likely to me.