Crusie, Jennifer - The Cinderella Deal, Maybe This Time

[oyceter]

The Cinderella Deal (1996) - Linc Blaise is trying get a position at a local college, but for reasons that make sense nowhere but in romance-novel land, the people hiring expect him to be engaged. So he makes an offer to his disorganized, down-on-cash neighbor Daisy. Naturally, despite being complete opposites, attraction, lust, etc. I will say upfront that normally I hate the free-spirited, somewhat hippie women so prevalent in contemporary romance novels. I always feel like shaking them and saying, "Sometimes predictability is not a bad thing! As is not having mold on your dishes!"

This is, of course, utterly hypocritical, since I'm pretty sure I am that person to a lot of other people. (Okay, no mold. But no matter how neat I am, there are always piles of things, and I will never be Linc Blaise or anything remotely like him.)

Still, Crusie always manages to make me like her people, and this is no exception. I especially like watching Linc and Daisy compromise, and despite the romantic-comedy-ness of the set up, the two wanting each other and being convinced it's a terrible idea was very convincing.

Maybe not one of Crusie's best, but definitely one I enjoyed a lot.

Maybe This Time (2010) - When Andie Miller goes in to ask her ex-husband North Archer to stop sending alimony checks (she wants closure and they're a reminder), he says yes, but asks her to watch over his two wards, who are living in what may or may not be a haunted house.

This is the first Crusie I've read that I've not classified as a romance (I've never read her collaborations with Bob Mayer). The story is really more a mystery: is the house haunted? Why? What to do? And how to get the kids out of there?

Although I liked Andie with the two kids, who amazingly do not make me want to vomit with their overbearing cuteness, the ghost story wasn't great, particularly as more and more characters start to come in. I felt like, as in, Tell Me Lies, Crusie was sometimes tackling a subject too dark for her trademark humor, especially since everything ends up happily ever after. I was particularly unhappy with the characterization of the female reporter. Overall, I felt it suffered a bit from not being a romance, because I found the end conclusion with North coming in and the two falling back in love to be a bit too rushed.

Still funny, but it felt very unbalanced to me.

Comments

[lnhammer]

I will have to look for Maybe This Time -- I hadn't realized she'd gotten back to writing solo again.

---L.

[oyceter]

I was excited when I saw it! Like I said, it's not her best, but I miss having new just-Crusie.

[kalmn]

i read maybe this time this week, and it was exactly the book i needed to read. the part where north reacts to will saying that of course they'll adopt the kids, and north thinking about will using the kids as "andie-bait", it hit me hard, but hey, that's due to various history i have, not due to it being a faboo book, necessarily, but it left me without the distance to judge it as impartially as i usually would.

also, i loved isolde. heh.

[oyceter]

Isolde was pretty awesome!

But yeah, I know what you mean about sometimes not having the distance to judge a book impartially.