Video: Whatcha Reading, Jennifer Weiner?

July 20, 2011 by Ron.Hogan

“Whatcha Reading?” is a web series from Ron Hogan in which authors recommend a great book.

It’s a big summer for bestselling author Jennifer Weiner, with both a new book AND a new television series to celebrate. The novel, Then Came You, is about a pregnancy that involves four women—the egg donor, the surrogate mother, the woman who recruits them to have her child, and the jealous stepdaughter who could disrupt everything—told in Weiner’s sensitive but gently humorous soap-operatic style. And if you get the ABC Family channel, you can watch Raven-Symoné as an aspiring young actress Tuesday nights in State of Georgia, a sitcom which Weiner co-created with Jeff Greenstein.

Weiner is reading The Kid. At the end of Sapphire’s first novel, Push, Precious gives birth to son Abdul, and now she tells the story of what happens to the young boy after his mother’s death, as he becomes trapped in a cycle of sexual abuse. While critics seem to all agree that the novel’s graphic descriptions of what happens to Abdul (and what he does and imagines in response) are profoundly disturbing, they are split on the literary merits of Sapphire’s story. In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani criticizes The Kid as “the confused ditherings of a mentally ill character,” but Washington Post reviewer DeNeen Brown praises Sapphire as “a fearless writer with complete command of her story.” Weiner is similarly dazzled by Abdul’s first-person narration, comparing it to another of her recent favorite novels, Emma Donoghue’s Room.

DEEPER DIVE

Read the first chapter of Then Came You.

Watch an interview with Sapphire about the release of The Kid:

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