The Breakaway by Jennifer Weiner

Jennifer Weiner will always be one of my favorite authors! The character driven story lines are always done so good, and the stories are always much more than what they seem. At first this one seems like a romance, but it also has so many important themes - loving yourself, mother/daughter relationships, body positivity, mental health, and a women's right to choose.

Synopsis: Thirty-three-year-old Abby Stern has made it to a happy place. True, she still has gig jobs instead of a career, and the apartment where she’s lived since college still looks like she’s just moved in. But she’s got good friends, her bike, and her bicycling club in Philadelphia. She’s at peace with her plus-size body—at least, most of the time—and she’s on track to marry Mark Medoff, her childhood summer sweetheart, a man she met at the weight-loss camp that her perpetually dieting mother forced her to attend.

Fifteen years after her final summer at Camp Golden Hills, when Abby reconnects with a half-his-size Mark, it feels like the happy ending she’s always wanted. Yet Abby can’t escape the feeling that some­thing isn’t right...or the memories of one thrilling night she spent with a man named Sebastian two years previously. When Abby gets a last-minute invi­tation to lead a cycling trip from NYC to Niagara Falls, she’s happy to have time away from Mark, a chance to reflect and make up her mind. But things get complicated fast.

First, Abby spots a familiar face in the group—Sebastian, the one-night stand she thought she’d never see again. Sebastian is a serial dater who lives a hundred miles away. In spite of their undeniable chemistry, Abby is determined to keep her distance. Then there’s a surprise last-minute addition to the her mother, Eileen, the woman Abby blames for a lifetime of body shaming and insecurities she’s still trying to undo.

Over two weeks and more than seven hundred miles, strangers become friends, hidden truths come to light, a teenage girl with a secret unites the riders in unexpected ways...and Abby is forced to reconsider everything she believes about herself, her mother, and the nature of love.

Something I really enjoyed about this story was the biking aspect of it. Although I am not much of a biker myself, it was interesting and I enjoyed the way it wove in with the story. I also found it neat that the route ended in Niagara Falls which is a place very familiar to me as its close to where I live. Its always fun when a book has little familiar tidbits like this.

I find sometimes with Jennifer's books that the characters stories get introduced and I feel confused as to how this fits in with the main character/main plot, but then somehow it always gets tied together so well in the end. Each character has a story that makes it hard not to love them, flaws and all.

Jennifer never shies away from real issues people face on a day to day, and always handles it with grace. I think this book is one of my favorites this year, as usually the case with this authors books.

I highly recommend this one to anyone looking to get sucked into a good story with wonderful and unique characters. Be sure to check the trigger warnings first though as it does deal with some sensitive topics (some big ones include abortion, fatphobia, and alcoholism).