Novel of the week: Fly Away Home by Jennifer Weiner

(Simon & Schuster, $26.99)

Like every other best-seller Jennifer Weiner has written, her latest focuses in part on “how women view and treat their bodies,” said Natasha Clark in Elle.com. Sylvie Woodruff, a 57-year-old senator’s wife, has been forced by scandal to reinvent herself after many years during which her “only real job” seemed to be dutifully “staying 20 pounds thinner than she’d been in law school.” After her husband has a headline-making affair with a younger woman, Sylvie retreats to a beach house with two adult daughters whom she’d long neglected. A well-written page-turner, Fly Away Home proves the “best offering in years” from the author who created the chick-lit classics Good in Bed and In Her Shoes, said Alicia Rancilio in the Associated Press. All three Woodruff women are intriguing characters, said Carol Memmott in USA Today. “As always,” Weiner’s story has a simple lesson: Each woman will be made happiest by ignoring social expectations and “choosing to live an authentic life.”