In Her Shoes

What's inside (8 sections)

1. Two sisters, one shoe size
2. Rose lets Maggie move in
3. The split
4. Princeton library basement
5. Ella in Florida
6. Dogs, dresses, and starting over
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

I came to In Her Shoes sideways, through Good in Bed. I had read Jennifer Weiner's first novel about Cannie Shapiro and liked how Philadelphia felt in it, lived in and a little tired, not a postcard. I wanted more of that city and that voice. First published in 2002 by Atria Books, with 432 pages in the first hardcover, this second novel stays in Philadelphia for a while and then moves to Princeton and to Florida. It follows two sisters who share a shoe size and not much else.

Short version: Rose Feller is thirty, a lawyer, careful with money and food and plans. Maggie Feller is twenty eight, beautiful, broke, dyslexic, and unable to keep a job. After their mother died when they were girls, Rose looked after Maggie. Now Maggie moves into Rose's apartment, sleeps with Rose's boyfriend, and both sisters scatter until their grandmother Ella takes them in.

That sounds simple. The book takes its time getting there, through offices and libraries and retirement community dining rooms. Parts of it frustrated me. Most of it held me.

Two sisters, one shoe size

Rose opens the story. She works at Lewis, Dommel, and Fenick, a Philadelphia firm. She went to Princeton, then to law at the University of Pennsylvania. She bills hours, reviews documents, tries to be the reliable one in meetings. At home in Rittenhouse Square she reads romance novels she would never mention at work and thinks about starting an exercise plan next week.

She is single and lonely in a particular way. Men notice her at work for her brain and then look past her in bars. Then Jim Danvers, a younger partner at the firm, starts paying attention. Rose falls hard and lets herself believe this could steady everything else.

Maggie is introduced in parallel. She is twenty eight and has never kept a job more than a few months. Bartending, retail, reception desks. She gets hired for her looks and fired for missing shifts or mixing up orders. What no employer knows at first is that she can barely read. Her dyslexia was never treated properly. School shunted her aside while Rose moved ahead on test scores. Maggie left high school without the tools she needed and learned to trade on charm instead.

Her great credit, the one she tells people at parties, is that her left hip once appeared in a Will Smith video. That is the level her acting hopes are at. She is behind on rent. Her roommates are tired of covering her. Their father Michael, still mourning their mother Caroline years after a car crash killed her, sends money when he can. His second wife Sydelle does not hide that she resents both girls. Sydelle dotes on her own daughter Marcia and keeps a mental file of Rose's weight. One family dinner memory that sticks is Sydelle serving Rose sugar free gelatin while everyone else eats ice cream, then talking about Marcia fitting into a size six Vera Wang that had to be taken in.

The sisters have not been close as adults. Rose sends checks. Maggie cashes them and disappears. The one physical fact that ties them is shoes. They wear the same size. Maggie borrows Rose's shoes without asking and stretches them out. Rose hates it and also likes being needed. That shoe borrowing turns out to be the whole book in miniature, who takes, who gives, who walks where.

I thought this setup worked because Weiner lets both sisters be right about each other and wrong about themselves. Rose sees Maggie as careless. Maggie sees Rose as rigid. Both are partly correct. Rose is careful because someone had to be. Maggie is careless because care never got her very far in school or at home.

Rose lets Maggie move in

When Maggie gets evicted, Rose offers her couch. It feels like duty and like a chance. Maybe living together as adults will fix what childhood did not. Maggie arrives with bags and stories. She sleeps late. She leaves wet towels on the floor. She borrows clothes and shoes and returns them stained or not at all. She runs up Rose's credit cards on cabs and food. She tells Rose she is looking for work while spending afternoons watching television.

Rose tries to set rules and then feels guilty for needing them. She makes lists of temp agencies. Maggie loses the lists. Rose introduces her around. Maggie charms people Rose has worked months to impress and then forgets to follow up. Still, there are good nights. They watch movies. They talk about their mother Caroline, who died when Maggie was small and Rose was still a child herself. Rose remembers more. Maggie remembers being told stories. Neither remembers enough.

Work gets complicated at the same time. Jim and Rose are now openly dating. Rose brings him to her apartment. She is nervous about Maggie meeting him, and for good reason. Maggie performs without seeming to perform. Bare feet, sleepy eyes, a joke that lands. Rose watches Jim watch Maggie and tells herself she is being paranoid.

She is not being paranoid. Rose comes home one day and finds Maggie in Rose's bed with Jim. In her apartment. In sheets Rose picked out. Weiner does not make it ambiguous or drunkenly accidental. Maggie knew what she was doing. Jim knew what he was doing. Rose throws them both out in language I will not repeat here. The fight that follows between the sisters is ugly in the way only family fights get, with old grievances surfacing in seconds. Rose says Maggie ruins everything she touches. Maggie says Rose only helped so she could feel superior.

I believed the cruelty on both sides. It rang true that Rose, who prides herself on control, would say the worst thing first. It also rang true that Maggie, who expects to be thrown out, would make herself impossible to keep. What bothered me a little was Jim. He reads as a type, handsome and weak, there to move the plot. We get his suits and his smile and not much sense of why Rose trusted him beyond hope. Maybe that is the point. Hope can be thin evidence.

After Maggie leaves, Rose cannot face the office. She sees Jim in hallways. She hears people who know. She quits Lewis, Dommel, and Fenick rather than work around him. Five years of school and years of hours, set down in a week. Friends think she is having a breakdown. In a way she is.

The split

Rose drifts. She has savings but no plan. A friend of a friend needs someone to walk dogs during the day, and Rose says yes mostly to get out of her apartment. The money is small. The hours are outside. She learns routes through Rittenhouse and nearby streets. She learns which dogs pull and which ones need coaxing. A pug with no name becomes a regular. She carries bags of treats and extra leashes. Strangers talk to her because of the dogs in a way they never did when she carried a briefcase.

It would be easy to mock this turn, Ivy League lawyer walking pugs. Weiner does not play it for cheap laughs. Rose is good with the dogs because she pays attention and shows up on time. The work gives her days a shape while her head is still messy.

Maggie, meanwhile, gets thrown out of her father's house. Sydelle has had enough, and Michael does not fight her on it. Maggie steals some cash and a few things she can sell. She finds old letters from her grandmother in her father's desk, letters Michael kept but never answered. The return address points to Florida. Maggie pockets them without a clear plan.

She does not go south right away. She goes to Princeton, a place she knows from visiting Rose during college. She remembers the stone buildings and the lawns. She remembers feeling small there as a teenager, trailing after her brilliant sister while students hurried past. Now she returns with nowhere else to sleep.

Rose also starts seeing Simon Stein, a colleague from her old firm. He is steady where Jim was shiny. Their early dates are awkward in a decent way. Rose likes him and distrusts liking him.

Princeton library basement

Maggie finds a way into a lower level of the Princeton library and settles there. There is a bathroom with a shower. There are chairs no one uses at night. She stashes her bags behind shelves. During the day she sits in reading rooms and pretends to belong. At night she reads.

This matters because Maggie has avoided reading her whole life. School made it humiliation. Worksheets, timed tests, teachers who assumed laziness. Here, alone, she can sound out words without anyone watching. She starts with children's books and magazines. She moves to novels. She reads slowly and then faster. She discovers she likes poetry when she hears it aloud, the beat carrying her over hard words.

She also takes a part time job caring for an older woman near campus, company and errands and afternoon television. Maggie also slips into a poetry class when she can. A blind retired professor asks her to read to him, and though she stumbles at first, his patience steadies her.

Then a boy whose wallet Maggie stole earlier recognizes her things in the library. Her hideout collapses in one afternoon. She runs before it gets worse. I found this stretch overlong. The hiding requires a lot of luck. Still, the reading scenes earned their place for me.

She leaves Princeton with the Florida letters and a little money. She buys a bus ticket. She rehearses what she will say to a grandmother she has not seen since early childhood. She imagines rejection the whole ride down and keeps going anyway.

Ella in Florida

Ella Hirsch lives in a Florida retirement community for active seniors. Her days are full. She volunteers with Meals on Wheels. She works shifts at a thrift store. She records books for blind readers. She writes a small column for the Golden Acres Gazette, the community paper. Neighbors know her as capable and brisk. Under that is grief that has not moved in decades.

Ella is Caroline's mother. Caroline, Rose and Maggie's mother, died in a car crash when the girls were young. What the girls were told growing up was thin. Grandma was in a home. They could not visit. The truth, which comes out in pieces, is that Michael blamed Ella for Caroline's death. Caroline lived with mental illness and had stopped taking medication around the time she died. Michael, wild with loss, shut Ella out and kept the girls from her. Ella tried to find them later online and could only find traces of Rose, a firm bio and an address she did not trust herself to use.

So when Maggie knocks on her door in Florida, Ella is stunned and then practical. She feeds her. She gives her a bed. She asks few questions the first night. In the morning she asks more. Maggie tells a cleaned up version of her life and Ella lets the gaps sit. She has waited too long for this granddaughter to scare her off with interrogation.

Their early weeks together gave me my favorite scenes. Ella teaching Maggie how to shop for the building's older residents. Maggie learning that a bent-over woman who complains about everything will still tip well if you remember her brand of tea. Ella watching Maggie try to read aloud to a neighbor and not commenting on the mistakes, just handing her a glass of water and turning the page back when she loses her place.

Maggie finds paid work as an aide in an assisted living facility nearby. The job fits skills school never measured. She is patient with people who repeat themselves. From there she starts personal shopping for women in Ella's building who cannot drive or hate malls. Word spreads. She charges fair prices and shows up when she says she will. For a character who once stole wallets, keeping appointments is real growth, and Weiner lets it accumulate instead of announcing it.

Rose arrives later, after Ella reaches out and after Simon nudges her to answer. The sisters circle each other. Old insults sit close to the surface. Ella does not force a reunion scene. She cooks. She assigns tasks. She lets them be useful in the same house. Slowly Rose sees that Maggie can read better now, that she holds a job, that the older women rely on her. Slowly Maggie sees that Rose left law and is still ashamed about it, that dog walking pays less but steadied her, that Simon is not Jim.

One fair criticism: Ella can feel too good. She is patient and wise and stocked with food. I wanted one scene where she is petty or tired in a way that costs Maggie something. We get hints, her guilt about Caroline and her years of writing letters Michael returned. Those hints help, but compared with Sydelle, Ella sometimes feels built to forgive.

Another criticism: Sydelle stays a caricature. Botox jokes, sugar free gelatin, Marcia's wedding dress. Michael gets a little more shading, a grieving man who made a cruel choice about Ella and then lived inside it. I wished Weiner had given Sydelle even one tired evening scene to complicate her.

Dogs, dresses, and starting over

The last third moves quickly. Rose keeps walking dogs even as she takes on freelance legal work. She likes the mix more than she expected. Animals do not care about her resume. Clients recommend her. She starts to admit she may not return to firm life, at least not the version that required her to smile at Jim in conference rooms.

Her relationship with Simon deepens, then hits a rough patch when Rose shuts down about Maggie. Simon wants to help. Rose hears interference. They separate briefly after he sees her leaning on Jim for work talk instead of trusting him with the family story. It is a familiar fight, who gets told what and when, and Weiner handles it without villains. Simon is hurt. Rose is embarrassed. They find their way back by talking plainly, which sounds dull and is actually hard for both of them.

Maggie keeps building her shopping work until she can imagine a small store of her own. She saves. She also keeps reading. Poetry stays with her, not as a career plan but as proof she can learn when teaching meets her where she is.

The sisters reconcile in actions more than speeches. Maggie apologizes without expecting instant pardon. Rose listens without grading the apology. They talk about Caroline with Ella, who finally tells them who their mother was beyond the photo on the mantel, funny and troubled and loved. They talk about Michael's choice to cut Ella off and what it cost all of them. No one is excused. Everyone is understood a little better.

Maggie makes Rose's wedding dress. That is the closing image that matters. Rose marries Simon in a dress her sister sewed for her, fitted to a body Rose spent years hiding. Women from Ella's building attend. Dogs are walked by someone else for the day. Cannie Shapiro from Good in Bed passes through briefly, a nice touch for Weiner readers, placing this book in the same Philadelphia world without forcing a crossover.

What stays with me is not the wedding. It is earlier, smaller moments. Rose choosing shoes she can actually walk in. Maggie reading a poem aloud twice to get the rhythm right. Ella setting a third plate without comment the night Rose arrives. Those scenes carry the point better than any summary could. People learn to fit where others have been.

If you want a fast plot, this may feel slow in the Princeton middle and quick at the end. The store comes together fast. Simon's patience sometimes feels endless. Sydelle never softens. I did not mind much because the central line held. Two sisters who hurt each other badly learn to be useful to each other again. Not identical. Not best friends overnight. Just kinder, and more honest about need.

Read it for the sisters and for Ella. Stay for the dogs and the shoes. Expect some convenience in how jobs and apartments appear. Expect also a few scenes that land hard, a shared shoe stretched out of shape, a library chair after hours, a Florida kitchen where no one says the important thing until the dishes are done.

FAQ

When was In Her Shoes published?

Atria Books published it in September 2002 in the United States. The first hardcover runs 432 pages, ISBN 9780743418195.

Is In Her Shoes part of a series?

No. It is a standalone novel. Cannie Shapiro from Good in Bed makes a brief cameo, but the Feller sisters' story starts and ends here.

Who does Rose end up with?

Rose marries Simon Stein, a fellow lawyer, after leaving her firm and her cheating boyfriend behind. Maggie sews her wedding dress.