Reading Meme, Day Six

Day Six – Your favorite writer

Jennifer Crusie. There is no doubt.

Bet Me was one of the frontrunners in the competition for My Favorite Book Ever post from yesterday. I love Bet Me and it's my favorite comfort read. Agnes and the Hitman, Anyone But You, Manhunting, What the Lady Wants, and Crazy For You are all fantastic reads too. Her books are an automatic buy for me unless I can manage to score ARCs of them.

Jenny Crusie does not write romance. She writes chick lit. Romance is an aspect to be sure but not the focus. Her women usually undergo some kind of epiphany about their lives and then manage to Forrest Gump their way to a happy ever after. They meet wonderful men who are completely mystified by them but in the end can't help but fall in love with them. There's always conflict - like the bet in Bet Me or the ghosts in Maybe This Time - but what would a good book be without conflict? There is always humor, that trademark Crusie humor that I love so much.

She's not perfect. With the exception of Agnes, I find that her collaborations tend to be her weakest efforts but are not completely without value.

I bought her last solo paperback a little while ago but *sigh* haven't read it yet.

According to jennycrusie.com and amazon.com, her first book in her Liz Danger series, Lavender Blue, will hit the stores in June 1, 2011. There are four parts mentioned on Crusie's website with the second, Rest in Pink, to come out in July.

Follow THIS LINK to Angieville and read Angie's thoughts on Bet Me. I couldn't have done it better myself. Go HERE to find out more about this meme.

Review: Maybe This Time by Jennifer Crusie

When Andie Miller goes to see her ex-husband, North Archer, to return ten years of uncashed alimony checks, he asks for one final favor: A distant cousin has died and left him guardian of two orphans who have driven out three nannies already; will she take the job? Bribed with money and a need for closure, Andie says yes, but when she meets the two children she realizes things are much worse than she feared. The children aren’t any run-of-the-mill delinquents, the creepy old house where they live is being run by the worst housekeeper since Mrs. Danvers, and something strange is happening at night. Plus, Andie’s fiance thinks it’s a plan by North to get Andie back, and since Andie’s been dreaming about North since she arrived at the house, she’s not sure he isn’t right. Then her ex-brother-in-law arrives with a duplicitous journalist and a self-doubting parapsychologist, closely followed by an annoyed medium, Andie’s tarot card–reading mother, her avenging ex-mother-in-law, and her jealous fiancé. Just when Andie’s sure things couldn’t get more complicated, North arrives to make her wonder if maybe this time things could be different…. (from jennycrusie.com)

It's nice to know Jennifer Crusie still has it. According to the back of this lovely ARC that I got from LibraryThing and St. Martin's Press, this is the first solo novel Ms. Crusie has written for six years, when she published Bet Me. For those of you who don't know, Bet Me is one of my absolute favorite novels of ever and ever amen. It was the book that introduced me to Crusie and it was love at first sight.

Maybe This Time is a little bit different than Crusie's other solo novels; this is a ghost story. Not just any ghost story but, according to Crusie's website, it's a modernish adaptation of The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. Maybe This Time is set in an English manor (or something similar) that has been relocated to southern Ohio, stones and all. It even has a moat. Andie is a teacher and in a weak moment agrees to relocate for a month from Columbus to get the children ready to attend public school and to rehabilitate this pair of kids who have gone through nannies like Kleenex. Her ex had inherited the children from a distant relation but after a disastrous attempt to send the older boy to a boarding school, hasn't had much contact with them other than to provide them money (he's actually not a jerk, just a lawyer). When Andie gets there, she finds the house and property to be a wreck, the housekeeper to be creepy, and the children strange and antisocial at best. She also soon finds herself questioning her belief that there's no such thing as ghosts and are the conversations she has at night in her bedroom with a young woman who claims to be a younger Andie real or is she dreaming? Why are the children so determined not to leave their house and why do they keep nannies running for the border? Most importantly, why did Andie agree to do this for her ex-husband North?

Andie is a typical Crusie female protagonist - practical yet unconventional with a great sense of humor and a screwy love life. North is also consistent with Crusie's main men - an intelligent man who has a job with some authority, usually a cop or someone who owns their own business, and who is stumped by the woman he has picked to love. Andie and North married within twelve hours of first laying eyes on each other in a bar. They divorced a year later when Andie left him and have spent the last ten years subconsciously pining for each other. We don't get to see any of their marriage, pity that, but it amused me greatly that Andie, after getting a marriage proposal from her current boyfriend, visits North at work to return ten years worth of alimony checks. One a month for ten years, she didn't cash a single one, claiming that it was his way of reminding her of him.

Also present is the supporting cast of oddballs and weirdos. Crusie isn't stingy this time either: there's an obnoxious tv reporter and her cameraman; a medium who curses like a sailor; North's younger brother, Sullivan a.k.a. Southie; two mothers-in-law; an expert on the paranormal who doesn't believe in ghosts; the ghosts; a private detective. No animals though.

The paranormal aspect of Maybe This Time is better handled than the demons were in Wild Ride and the ghosts here make the story better, not worse, even though they brought a measure of malevolence not usually found in Crusie's books. I would have expected them to be there for humor, not malice, but I've never read The Turn of the Screw. The trademark Crusie humor is here, of course, and made me laugh out loud several times. I really enjoyed reading Maybe This Time but I didn't love it like Bet Me. I became worried when I read Wild Ride earlier this year but I'm okay now because Jenny Crusie is back! Upcoming next year is a murder mystery series and here's the description from jennycrusie.com:

Liz Danger Mystery Series

First two novels scheduled for release in summer 2011.
A four book limited romantic mystery series about ghostwriter Liz Danger who goes back to her home town, Birney, Ohio, and finds love and crime. Complicating everything is Vince, the new cop on the local beat, who makes Liz think twice about her aversion to Birney in particular and commitment in general.

A reissue of one of the last books in her booklist that I have not read, Trust Me on This, will be out on October 26, 2010. Maybe This Time comes out on August 31.

Go HERE if you're like me and you want to make Andie's banana bread :)

Review: Wild Ride by Jennifer Crusie & Bob Mayer

The wildest ride at Dreamland isn’t the roller coaster.

Lots of women think they’ve fallen in love with a demon. Mab Brannigan really has...

Mary Alice Brannigan doesn't believe in the supernatural. Nor does she expect to find that she’s the newest recruit in the Guardia, an elite team of demon fighters formed centuries before to guard the five Untouchables, the most powerful demons in the history of the world, now imprisoned right there in the Dreamland amusement park. That would be bad enough, but there’s a guy she’s falling hard for, and there’s something about him that’s not quite right...

Then there’s Ethan Wayne, a former Green Beret who’s come home to Dreamland to die. Ethan has his own problems including a bullet in his chest inching closer to his heart, a true love who shoots him on sight, and a mother who drags him into the Guardia after he’s possessed by a crazed killer mermaid demon. Between ducking his mother’s attempts to reform him and dodging the bullets of a secret government agent he’s pretty sure is his soulmate, Ethan really doesn’t have time for demons, touchable or not.

But rocky romances and demented demons aren’t Mab and Ethan’s only problems: they’re also coping with a crooked politician, a supernatural raven, a secret government agency, an inexperienced sorceress, a betrayer within the Guardia, and some mind-boggling revelations from their own pasts. As their personal demons wreck their newfound relationships and real demons wreck the park, Mab and Ethan find out that the Untouchables have escaped and opened the gate to hell on earth. Now they’re facing down the Devil himself and finding out what everybody who’s ever been to an amusement park knows: the end of the ride is the wildest.

I have no idea what Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer were thinking when they wrote this book and certainly I wouldn't be so presumptuous to tell one of my favorite authors what to write about in the future but as a faithful reader, I have one thing I really need to say: Please stay away from paranormal stuff in the future. Please. Pretty pretty please.

I so wanted to like Wild Ride. I have written about how freaking fantastic I think Jennifer Crusie is (Bob Mayer deserves a mention too) and how I love her books but I have to admit, when I read the blurb for this book way before it came out I got a little nervous. Why is Jennifer Crusie writing about demons when she writes about regular people so well? I got even more nervous when Jane said she couldn't even finish it. Whoa! I had prepared myself for a book that had some problems that weren't so big that they couldn't be ignored but she couldn't even bring herself to finish it? That's so not good, I thought, but I put on my big-girl panties and sat down with this alleged odious book to see what I thought anyway.

I think this is was a mess. The goofy Jenny Crusie humor was there in spots thank goodness but the overall tone of the book was sad. "...a former Green Beret who's come home to Dreamland to die"? What's entertaining about that? And Mab, a repressed woman who spends more time involved with her artistic works than with people? What about the demonic possession and death in an old amusement park? That definitely sounds plausible to me since clowns are freaky but am I going to want to read a romance with that as the setting? Probably not. Sounds more like a Dean Koontz novel.

Maybe it’s because my copy is an ARC and they hadn't completely worked out all the bugs but some things aren’t clear, like how Ethan and Mab are basically strangers that graduated from the same high school class but by two-thirds through the book, with what seems like little interaction, are close and think of each other like siblings. I would have liked to have seen more of what their childhoods were like and seen them fleshed out a bit more. We are told that Mab’s mom was a bit fanatic about demons in the park but why? Some real family history would have been nice instead of little bits supplied when only necessary.

Not only were the platonic relationships out of whack but the romantic relationships are different than usual too: in Jenny Crusie books, the main male and female characters become romantically involved by the end but usually fight in the beginning. My favorite example of this is Bet Me. In this one, Mab falls for a drunkard who is possessed by a demon and pays her the slightest bit of attention. She goes instantly from obsessing about the decorations and artifacts in the park to becoming a infatuated with a man, then falling again with one look at another while Ethan ends up with a Homeland Security soldier who fights the paranormal, a female GI Joe. Ethan and GI Jane make sense but after Mab quickly gets over her demon and she falls for that other guy, it seems more like an afterthought, as if they don't want Mab to feel left out of the happy ending.

I'm not going to talk about all the demonic stuff happening at Dreamland except to say that in the right author's hands, it could have been good and scary as I don't think it was meant to be a romance. Though there are some amusing things about Wild Ride that stuck out to me, like there being a witch named Glenda and the squabbling demon spouses. There were periods where Wild Ride had the feel of Agnes and the Hitman, the only collaboration of the three between Crusie and Mayer that I felt was a success. Those periods were the reason that I made it through Wild Ride and for them, I thank you. On crusiemayer.com they have for a free download a short story prequel to Wild Ride called "Wild Night". I haven't read it yet as I found it as I was writing this review but maybe that will be the backstory I was looking for. Jenny Crusie has a solo book out on August 31, 2010 called Maybe This Time. Ironic title, don't you think?