Book review: The Mother-Daughter Book Club by Heather Vogel Frederick

The fifty-second book I read in 2016 was the first book in a series of tween-y novels, The Mother-Daughter Book Club by Heather Vogel Frederick.  The schtick is that the characters in the book read a girly classic over the course of a school year and life imitates art, as events in the girls' lives roughly parallel situations in the book they are reading.

The four girls are Emma, the overweight, bookish one; Jess, the smart one;  Megan, the popular girl; and Cassidy, the jock.  They alternate narrating the chapters.  Their mothers, who have no more in common than the girls do, are a librarian, an actress on a soap opera, an activist, and a retired supermodel (yes, really).  But they all take the same yoga class and come up with the idea of forcing their daughters into the titular book club.

Verisimilitude-wise, the series might as well be set in Sweet Valley, but I guess the literary tie-in gives it some educational value.  Over the course of their sixth-grade year, the girls (mostly under duress) read Little Women and slowly build (or repair) relationships with each other and their families.  There's a little too much focus on boyfriends for twelve-year-olds for my taste.