Archive for: December, 2010

A Big Thank You at Year’s End

Dec 31 2010 Published by under Navel gazing

Thank you for reading this blog, for commenting, for your emails and tweets and RTs.  Please keep visiting in 2011.

Thank you to my fellow book bloggers. I love reading your reviews, meditations, and goofy posts almost as much as I love reading novels. Keep blogging in 2011.

Thanks to the folks on Twitter for great conversation, (too) many book recs, answers to my arcane questions, and a laugh whenever I need it. Keep Tweeting in 2011.

Thank you to writers –  aspiring, newly contracted, debut authors, midlisters, bestsellers, self-published, e-published, Smashworders, whoever you are, whatever and wherever you write. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Keep writing in 2011.

If you are in the book blogging community, especially if you are in the romance community, you’ve made my year. Thank you.

Whatever you are doing, whether it’s a ski holiday, a big party, a nice dinner with friends, braving a downtown First Night with kids, or staying in with a good book and a warm beverage, have a Happy New Year!

See you in 2011!

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Review: What the Lady Wants, by Jennifer Crusie

Dec 31 2010 Published by under Reviews

Back cover gets the hero's last name completely wrong

What the Lady Wants (excerpts and buying info here) was published in June 1995, and was named 1995 AOL Best Category Romance Novel (Remember AOL?)
Literary Times Outstanding Contemporary for 1995.

Here are some of Crusie’s notes:

Original Title: Whatever MaeBelle Wants

Writing Note: This book was born when an editor and I discovered we both loved the Thin Man films, and I started wondering how Nick and Nora might have met. After that, I lost my grip on the original idea as usual, but it was a fun way to begin. I almost cut the pipeline scene, because it didn’t move the plot or develop character, but wiser heads prevailed.

The book opens in classic detective movie fashion: the private eye sitting at his messy desk in a seedy part of town, the sweltering heat, the hot babe who strolls in asking for help. He’s one paycheck away from bankruptcy and she’s trouble, but attractive trouble, so before he knows it, Mitch Peatwick is off and running as Mae Sullivan’s boy Friday. Mae’s Uncle Armand has died, and she thinks he’s been murdered. Luckily, Armand kept a diary which should be chock full of cluses, but of course it’s gone missing. Mae hires Mitch to help her find it.

Of course, nothing is as it seems. Armand died in his sleep, and Mitch is actually a stock broker pretending to be a detective on a bet. But there is lots of money at stake, the Sullivan family is quite terrifying, Mae’s ex husband shows up, there’s a beautiful mistress named Stormy Weather, and a genuine, if slightly goofy, mystery surrounding the diary and what it may reveal. Mae and Mitch’s attitude towards marriage, the overcoming of which is the main obstacle to love for both of them, are made clear in chapter one:

Mitch: “You’re thirty-four?”

Mae: “I’m thirty-four.”

Mitch: “You don’t look thirty-four.”

“That’s because I’m not married.” Mae’s smile felt as if it were set in concrete. “Marriage tends to age a woman.”

“Doesn’t do much for a man, either.”

“Actually it does. Married men live longer than single men.”

“It just seems longer.” He leaned back in his chair and surveyed her with patent cynicism.

Mae’s family is actually pretty interesting. When she was young, her parents died in a car crash and she was sent to live with her Uncle Armand, a real bastard — by which I mean a recognizably real one, not the sinister eeeevil fake kind. The housekeepers are her surrogate parents, and Mae just wants to find the missing money to help take care of them (“they raised me. They need me. they count on me. I owe them.”). I’m finding a consistent antagonism to accumulating wealth for wealth’s sake in early Crusie, making Mae’s noble goal consistent with this author’s moral universe. All of the characters, from Mae’s brutish, lustful cousin Carlo, to her cold, “fish eyed” Uncle Claud are fun to meet.

There are gunshots, but never any real danger, and the tone is quite zippy and light throughout. Trademark Crusie, many scenes have several talky characters coming in and out, slapsticky action taking place, interruptions, talking while trying to do other things, bam bam bam pacing.

Mitch’s back story is less interesting: he became a detective almost a year ago on a dare, and if he ends the year in the black, he will have won the bet. He’s mostly just a really good guy. To be honest, neither Mae nor Mitch has much growing up to do outside of jettisoning their wrong ideas about love so they can fall in love with each other. Mae had been married once (older heroine, has a real romantic past) and now swears off love, while Mitch is allergic to commitment for no apparent reason (“I think marriage is sacred, which is why I never do it.”).

Like many Crusie heroes, Mitch’s only flaw is immaturity about love and woman. He spouts biological theories as to why men must “explore the West” (a funny euphemism for sleeping with a lot of women) and women always want to settle down. His “perfect” woman is always available for sex and never argues. They begin by being strongly attracted to one another, but, certain that’s a bad idea, they move towards love almost by accident.

A persistent theme in this book is the tension between being interdependent and being dependent. Mae thinks, “for me, love is a partnership”, and even Mitch knows that “Mae would go ballistic at the thought of anyone taking care of her”. Eventually Mitch abandons the librarian fantasy, recognizing the benefit of  loving “somebody who would meet him toe to toe, for the rest of his life, on her own terms.” Mae learns to separate unhealthy dependence from healthy interdependence, too: “It was the way he took care of her by not taking care of her, the way he trusted her to take care of herself.”

I enjoyed this one. I liked both Mae and Mitch, I thought the plot was interesting and funny without being ridiculous, the sexual tension was definitely there, and Mae and Mitch grew from like to love in a believable way.

4 responses so far

Finding Balance in Blogging

Dec 30 2010 Published by under Blogs and blogging

This post is dedicated to Geraldine Doyle

I’ve really been enjoying the end of year posts, be they Top 10s or New Year’s Resolutions or whatever. This is my version of an end of the year “reflective” post. If you hate philosophy, skip down to the list below.

Some ethical theories are based on rules or principles. For example, W.D. Ross has his famous list of 7 duties, including fidelity, reparation and gratitude. Aristotle was a bit different. You can read everything Aristotle had to say about ethics and find very few principles.

Aristotle’s idea was to consider what human beings are like, and then think about what the best kind of life for our kind of beings is. Rather than listing rules to follow, he thought about which character traits — he called them “virtues” — would lead to the best human life. He thought that any kind of thing or activity could have characteristic virtues (and if you’ve taken my ethical theory class you may have heard way too much about pruning tools. SORRY!). You just had to start with a conception of a thing’s function, then think about what it would mean to do that function with excellence.

A virtue is a good trait that leads to (and is constitutive of ) a thing’s excellence. Aristotle thought that virtues had a unique kind of structure, which has come to be known as the “doctrine of the mean.” Each virtue had two characteristic vices, a vice of deficiency and a vice of excess. So, for example, if courage is a virtue, the vice of excess would be foolhardiness, and the vice of deficiency would be cowardice.

So how do we know when we’ve found the mean? It wouldn’t be right to say that Aristotle thought we should “aim for moderation” in everything. For one thing, there is no moderate amount of murder or spite. Instead, we have to have in mind our goals or vision of the good, we must use our practical reason, and hopefully we have in mind a kind of exemplar — someone who is really good at the activity in question — to refer to.

I sometimes think about blogging in these terms, although I readily admit the fit is not perfect. The good I am aiming for in the blog is to provide a contributing, sometimes unique, voice in the conversation about (mainly) romance novels. I also definitely have my blogging exemplars.

I don’t have any specific resolutions or goals for the blog for 2011. But here are a some extremes I am going to try to avoid:

  1. Balance between 100% focus on quantity versus 100% focus on quality of posts
  2. Balance between caring too much versus caring too little about what others think
  3. Balance between writing new content for this blog, and enjoying others’ content (as well as Twitter and other social media)
  4. Balance between reading what everyone else is reading and reading what nobody else is reading
  5. Balance between a fast loading clutter free blog versus having a slow loading blog with lots of user friendly features
  6. Balance between having no schedule and having too rigid of a schedule
  7. Balance between feeling free to say what I think, even when it is unpopular, versus making unwise comments that are not worth the grief they may cause me (i.e. picking my battles)
  8. Balance between putting marginally written content out there versus obsessing over it with frequent edits and rereads
  9. Balance between ignoring the fact that there is a whole blogopshere out there versus running myself ragged all over the blogosphere
  10. Balance between being afraid to take up another blogger’s post here versus taking every issue here and not engaging with the original blogger on her turf
  11. Balance between never bothering to do anything to make my posts stand out versus doing things specifically to catch attention
  12. Balance between reviewing well known or major press authors versus debut or small press authors
  13. Balance between reading books that are comfortable versus reading books that stretch my boundaries
  14. Balance between my preference for text-only posts versus most other people’s preferences for images
  15. Balance between wordiness versus morse code brevity
  16. Balance between responding to every single comment, email and tweet versus rarely, if ever, responding
  17. Balance between never noticing cool things on other blogs or learning from other bloggers versus comparing my blog in an unhealthy way to other blogs
  18. Balance between content rich, complete posts versus crowd-sourced posts that invite reader participation

Like most people, I lean more heavily on one of another side of each of the above pairs. Aristotle says that if you know that about yourself, you should try extra hard to lean the other way.

Obviously, this will be a special challenge for #15!

14 responses so far

Review: Strange Bedpersons, by Jennifer Crusie

Dec 30 2010 Published by under Reviews

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I originally posted this review in 2009. Last night I re-skimmed the book, and found I only had to edit the review a tiny bit.

My Take in Brief: Only recommended for anal retentive Jenny Crusie fans, and then only for the completionist satisfaction.

Heroine and Hero: Tess is a hippie do-gooder. Nick is an ambitious yuppie lawyer.

Conflict: See heroine and hero, above.

Plot: To make partner, Nick needs to appear “settled”, so he needs a date for a weekend affair at a rich conservative writer’s country home. Naturally, he chooses his outspoken, Republican-baiting, commune-bred ex-girlfriend with whom he constantly bickers to make a good impression. There’s a subplot involving plagiarism that is even more stupid, another one that makes a depressing case for Churchill’s famous claim about maturity requiring conservatism, and a secondary romance between, essentially, Richie Rich and Pinky Tuscadero* that allows the author to deploy every cliché in her terrifyingly large arsenal (*showing my age, I know. If Pinky rings no bells for you, think Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny)

Word on the Web:

Mrs. Giggles, 74

AAR, Colleen M.,  A

Laurie Gold, C-

Bookish Reviews, B+

Trashionista, 4 out of 5

For fun: Dear Author’s “If you like” on Jennifer Crusie

My Review:

SB was originally published as a Silhouette in 1994, and reissued in paper in 2003 and then again in January 2009 in library edition hardcover with a cutesy cover you could use in place of Ipecac if you had to (see below). when I bought this in 2009, my Kindle edition was 4 bucks. Today the Kindle edition is $1.61. Thanks to AQ for the original covers below!

200901_strangebedpersons

This was the second book in a row that I began reading and felt as if I started in the middle. When we meet them, Nick and Tess have dated and split up, and he is knocking on her apartment door while she hangs with her EYE-talian friend Gina. Note the wink to romance conventions with the use of “grovel”:

Nick knocked again. “Tess? You want me to grovel? I’ll grovel. I’ve got a great grovel. You’ve never seen my grovel; you left before I could show it to you. Come on, Tess, let me in.”

Gina slumped back into the couch and jerked her head toward the door. “If you’re thinking about swapping your bod for money, go answer the door. He’s still loaded, right?”

Tess nodded. “I haven’t checked lately, but knowing Nick and his affinity for money, he’s still loaded.”

“Marry him,” Gina said.

“No,” Tess said.

“Why not?”

“Well, to begin with, he hasn’t asked me,” Tess said. “And he’s a Republican lawyer, so my mother would disown me. And then . . . ” Tess frowned as if in serious thought. “I always thought it would be a good idea to marry somebody who wouldn’t try to pick up the maid of honor at the reception. Call me crazy but –”

“Since that would be me, you got no worries,” Gina said. “Marry him.”

“You don’t know Nick,” Tess said. “He could seduce Mother Teresa.” She cocked her head toward the door and listened for a moment. “And it doesn’t seem to be an option anymore anyway. I think he got tired and left.”

She tried hard not to be disappointed. After all, she’d had no intention of opening the door anyway.

Still, it wasn’t like Nick to give up that fast, dangerous hallway or not. He must not have missed her that much after all.

Damn.

There are so many things I love about Jenny Crusie’s writing of romance. I love the humor and wit, of course, and the sexual tension, and the characterization. Politically, I love the egalitarianism, the liberalism, the positive construction of femininity and masculinity. When people ask me how I can teach and write feminist theory and still read romance, Crusie is one of the first authors who comes to mind. (Tess, rather than being a statuesque blonde, is Crusie’s trademark “warm and round”. And she has short red hair.)

But no amount of political affinity in the world will make me like a book if I cannot like the leads and cannot figure out why they do the stupid things they do. And besides that, this is the rare Crusie in which it feels like the heroine is one of those category cardboard liberals, whose “ideals” are so many strawmen, just waiting for a hero with a blowtorch.

Tess says, “Life is more than great sex and a nice car”, and when her friend Gina replies “Not much more”, you can be sure we are supposed to agree with Gina. Tess eventually does: in the end, she basically abandons her objections to Nick’s large income and larger home in return for a coat of colorful paint.

Crusie’s heroines often walk the line between being strong and being bitches, and Tess definitely goes over to the bitch side. On the reread, I noticed how often she “scowled”, “frowned”, was “indignant”, or “depressed”, expressed  “disgust”, or spoke “derisively”, “skeptically”. For example, her comment in the above quotation regarding the groom seducing the bridesmaid has no basis in Nick’s character (he’s true blue). When even the hero describes her as “tactless and undignified” you know you have a piece of work on your hands. She dumps Nick because he refused to have sex with her in a public parking lot. Equally irrationally, Tess decides to try to get a job at a posh private school (which, conveniently for the author, puts her in the path of Nick’s rich clients) and has no problem using old boy nepotism –  normally one of the main targets of true liberals — to do so.

Nick is underdeveloped, and, like Tess, he is a cardboard figure: he’s not ambitious for “bad” reasons: no, he’s making up for a financially precarious childhood.

There are some interesting, but unexplored, themes about the purpose of literature (the famous writer says to Tess “You’re probably one of those fools who thinks literature should be life-affirming”) and about whether it’s better to be Dr. Jeckyll or Mr. Hyde (naturally, Tess prefers Hyde because he’s “unpredictable”. I bet he would have done her in the parking lot!). But not enough to save the day from the impossibly retrograde premise (that a lawyer in 1994 must be “settled down” to make partner) or silly plagiarism subplot (Tess thinks the hippie who told her a story 30 years ago has copyright on it) with a highly improbable “twist” you can see coming a mile away.

Is this book worse than the average category? No, of course not. But I grade on a curve and the curve is not kind to authors who have written some of my favorite romances. Since this is a very early Crusie, there is some historical interest in seeing the germs for later ideas.

One thing that really interests me about Crusie is the way American wealth is characterized. In each of the categories I have read this week, there is a questioning or outright rejection of the pursuit of wealth, and not fantastic Steve Jobs wealth, but simple things like living in a new house with a three car garage or making partner. In this book, Nick thinks to himself that there is a difference between “ambition”, which is ok, and “naked ambition”, which is not, but it’s hard to tell what the difference is in any terms other than money. The theme in the 4 Crusie categories I have read seems to be that it’s bad to be ambitious about wealth and status, bit other kinds of ambition are ok.  Also, in this book, the wealthy — but not the middle and working classes — are highly conscious of propriety, of manners, of protocol, of mores. And yet, you have them rudely insulting the heroine, for example, at the dinner table. In my experience, the wealthy are not more personally conservative than other classes. If anything, less so. On the other hand, direct public insults to invited guests would not occur. There’s no need.

19 responses so far

A Doozie of a Crusie Reviewzie Schedule:

Dec 29 2010 Published by under Uncategorized

**scroll down for new posts**

I am working on a Jennifer Crusie project, and spending this winter break reading and reviewing many of her books. Visit Crusie’s website for a linked list with excerpts and buying info.

The order of reviews:

Continue Reading »

11 responses so far

Review: Getting Rid of Bradley, by Jennifer Crusie

Dec 29 2010 Published by under Reviews

Getting Rid of Bradley (click here for excerpt and buying info) was first published in 1994 as Harlequin Temptation #480. According to Fantastic Fiction, GRoB is #35 of a 50 book series called American Heroes: Against All Odds. It won the RITA for best contemporary short in 2005 1995.

2001 Reissue

I am not sure what the original cover was. The two covers in this post are the only covers I found (there is a second “suitcase cover” with the author’s name in a different font).* (see below for a third)  In any case, the cover above is, IMO, all wrong for this book. The heroine is a decidedly middle class, frumpy high school physics teacher who wears flowered dresses, and the hero is a hairy, leather jacket wearing cop. Almost all of the action takes place in the heroine’s house. Perhaps this cover is a case of trying to entice the chick lit market?

2008 Reissue

Thanks to AQ, here is a tiny pic of the original cover:

Getting Rid of Bradley begins with Lucy’s divorce from Bradley being finalized in court.  A past marriage or engagement is common in Crusie, perhaps a result of her typically older heroes and heroines. Lucy had been hoping her cheating ex (she found him with a blond in the living room) would show up, for closure’s sake, but he didn’t. As she is being bossed around by her loving but domineering sister Tina, Lucy has an epiphany:

Nobody’s ordering me around anymore. From now on, I’m going to be independent even if it is illogical. I’m going to be a whole new me.

The sisters end up eating lunch in a seedy diner, where two detectives also happen to be eating. We find out eventually that everybody is there for a reason, but in the meantime, Lucy notices one of the detectives:

Shorter, thicker, tense as a coiled spring in a creased black leather jacket, he leaned across the table and stabbed his index finger into the Formica. His unshaven face looked as if it were made of slabs, his hair was dark and shaggy, and his smile came and went like a broken neon sign. He was so intense, he was practically bending the table with the force of his personality.

Lucy is drawn to him, but, given that he’s slightly terrifying, immediately thinks the idea is “dumb.” Lucy’s superego is constantly giving her bad advice in the name of “logic”. Her struggle will be to learn to listen to her heart, to be more honest with herself, and to give herself permission to meet her own needs.

In contrast, Zack is impulsive, emotional, and intuitive. Like many Crusie heroes, Zack is allergic to the idea of domesticity for no apparent reason (“responsibility is death.”). This isn’t a criticism, by the way. I would rather have no “reason” for male resistance to monogamy than “my dad was abusive and I might be abusive” or “my mommy/ex was a cheater so you might be a cheater”.  He’s having a hard time aging (he just turned 36!), and worries that he’s slowing down, letting fear and practical reason subdue his “lightening fast instincts”. Also trademark Crusie, the hero has a confidante, his partner Alex, who urges him to stop dating brainless young things, and start trying to build a life outside of work.

As she’s leaving the diner, Lucy mentions “getting rid of Bradley”, in the metaphorical sense of “moving on”, but Zack, who happens to be working on an embezzlement case involving a banker named “Bradley”, thinks it is no coincidence and follows her out to the parking lot, where they get shot at. There’s a misunderstanding as Lucy thinks Zack is “some horrible drug dealer”, and Zack thinks Lucy may be a coconspirator to embezzlement.

It is fairly typical of Crusie for the hero and heroine to take an immediate dislike to each other (even where there is physical attraction). Zack can’t understand why Lucy’s devotion to her three dogs and home overrides her concern for her own safety (she won’t leave, despite the dangerous situation), and Lucy thinks Zack is a blustering blowhard. But in GRoB, the dislike evaporates pretty quickly, replaced by mild irritation and befuddlement. On the surface, Zack is as bossy as Lucy’s sister, but he brings out the fighting spirit in typically mild mannered Lucy, and she likes it:

“He just comes in here, out of the blue, and tells me somebody’s been shooting at me, and orders me around. Juts what I needed. Somebody else ordering me around.”

Only she hadn’t let him. She’d fought back.

And it felt really good.

“I think I’m on to something with this independence thing,” she told the dogs. “I really enjoyed arguing with him.”

The compromise is that Zack moves in, thus introducing him to the delights of domesticity, not to mention the delights of Lucy’s naked body.

All of this happens with the wit and humor and rapid fire dialogue Crusie is known for. One of the things that has surprised me the most, going back through her first books, is how developed her voice is. (A bit OT, but I also noticed that she never modifies words like “said” with adverbs.) Here is Zack’s partner and “wise best friend”, Anthony, taking in the scene after Zack has moved in:

“This is eerie,” Anthony said. “It’s like the night of the Living Yuppies.”
“Watch your mouth,” Lucy said. “We never Yup.”
“You know those old science fiction movies where the mad scientist puts a steel cap on a human being and another steel cap on an chimpanzee and pulls a switch, and their brains scramble?” Anthony looked toward the kitchen [where Zack is preparing dinner]. “That’s what this reminds me of.”
“Are you calling me a chimpanzee?” Lucy demanded.
“No, that would be Zack,” Anthony said, “What’s going on here?”
“What are you talking about” Lucy blushed. “There’s nothing going on here.”
Anthony grinned at her. Lucy was hooked. Now all he had to do was make sure of Zack.

I’m reading a bunch of early Crusies in rapid succession, a guarantee for getting even thick headed people like me to notice things, and I notice that it is common in her books for the hero and heroine to resist each other for very ephemeral reasons. They feel attraction, even lust, they feel warmth, admiration, affection, and then … they shake their heads as if clearing cobwebs, stiffen their resolves, and push it away. Why? In Lucy’s case, it’s that she’s just finalized her divorce, and also that Zack is quite deranged, and in Zack’s case, it’s that he doesn’t want to settle down, and also that Lucy is a bit bizarre with all her dogs, and her green hair. This passage is typical:

Of course, the real problem wasn’t that he turned her on. The real problem was that she liked being with him, she felt good around him. Happy. Warm.

Or this…

Which meant that he was in a lot more trouble than he’d realized. This was the first time his reality had ever been better than his fantasy. He’d found the perfect woman living in a great house with three dumb dogs. The smartest thing to do would be to run.

Why? Sometimes, in this book, it is hard to say. I felt that Lucy and Zack’s characters were a bit too defined by their oddities. We’re told more than shown that Zack is a crazy man, for example. Perhaps the bunker-like setting (Lucy can’t even go to work so great is the danger) prevented the kind of interactions in the outside world that would have let me get to know them as more rounded. While I appreciated the fact that Lucy was willing to take some of the blame for the failure of her marriage (no demonizing of exes in Crusie), in the end she comes off as just too good and too passive to be truly interesting.

That said, it’s a fine line, I think, between low conflict and the requisite genre tension, but Crusie manages it, helped by the fact that in a 200+ page category, there isn’t time for hero/ine resistance to love to feel like an authorial trick. For example, only a few paragraphs after the above Zack quote, he realizes that “it was what he wanted forever”, and he “surrendered without a qualm.”

This happens 61% of the way in to this book. So what happens for the other 39%? Well, there is the mystery of who is shooting at them and why. But in terms of the relationship, Zack and Lucy are on different time tables, thanks both to her recent divorce and to the fact that she is trying to be more independent, and Zack’s unilateral decision making style does not suit.

Eventually, Lucy comes around, resolving that independence and logic are not the same thing:

“I don’t believe in logic,” Lucy said. “I believe in love. Especially with someone who is spontaneous, irresponsible, and inappropriate.” She surveyed him critically. “That’s you.”

Perhaps because Lucy’s resistance to Zack seemed a tad manufactured in the last third, I felt the pacing was a bit off, but overall I enjoyed this one. Overall, it’s very fun: funny, with unexpected emotional zingers amid all the laughs.

5 responses so far

Review: Manhunting, by Jennifer Crusie

Dec 28 2010 Published by under Reviews

I’m writing on Jenny Crusie’s books this week. I am reposting an old review of her first book, Manhunting:

This is not exactly a review, but celebration of one of my favorite books.

Manhunting, originally published in 1993, and reissued twice since, is Crusie’s first published book (she had published one novella). The clearest indicator of how much I love this book is the fact that I was able to overlook the hero’s mustache, which is in full and glorious display on the original cover:

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Seriously, can you think of any sexy guys with mustaches? Not only is the mustache not sexy, but it has the power to de-sexify attractive men (as fans of  Brad Pitt, George Clooney, and Jude Law can attest). The mustache brings to mind such sexy beasts as Nietzsche, Stalin, Borat and the guy in My Name is Earl.

Actually, add a cowboy hat, and Earl is a good representation of Jake Templeton. For five years, Jake’s been the groundskeeper for “The Cabins”, the Kentucky golf resort he co-owns with his brother Will, who serves as manager (the heroine later calls the resort a “log cabin with a thyroid problem”). Jake was once a tax attorney married to Tiffany, a “brainy, efficient, calculating, manipulative, ambitious” woman. He traded the rat race and the marriage for the peace of The Cabins, and he’s been pretty content, but when we meet Jake, sitting out on the porch sipping coffee, looking at the sunrise, we discover that Jake has a “slight nagging feeling he might be missing something” which he immediately tries to tamp down and ignore.

At this point, we have already been introduced to Kate Svenson, age 35, who has a fabulous career in management consulting, great friends, and money, but she is lonely and longs for marriage and family.  Her best friend Jessie helps her craft a plan to find a “distinguished” husband with whom she can “build an empire”, and the plan includes going where the blue chip men are: The Cabins, or as her best friend Jessie calls it, “Outward bound with martinis”. I loved Kate. She’s smart, confident and funny as hell:

[T]here seemed to be at least a thousand people milling around. If she went skinny-dipping in the morning, she’d probably turn up in vacation slides all over the Midwest— “And here’s a shot of that crazy woman who used to go swimming buck naked every morning. Notice how her breasts are startin’ to droop?”

Within the first few pages, we have several Crusie trademarks:

  • the good friend/sibling who knows what’s best for the h/h
  • the immature hero who has been burned by love and forsaken it
  • the mature heroine who thinks (wrongly) she knows what she wants
  • the humor

    • Later, other trademark Crusie tropes emerge:

  • the “soft and round” heroine
  • the local watering hole (squee!) as the setting for working out relationship issues (often spurred by unacknowledged jealousy) (double squee!!)
  • the h/h are the “last to know” they are in lust and love

    • I’m not in love with Jake.” Kate took a deep breath. “And he’s not in love with me.”

    “Hold that thought, honey.” Nancy grinned at her. “It’s not going to do you a bit of good, but it will steady you for a while.”

    Jake and Kate are both unsatisfied with their lives, but Jake has a “niggle” and Kate has a “plan”. Kate loves her career, while Jake is content to tend the golf course and fish all day. This difference in their temperaments creates the main conflict they will face on their road to love. Of course, they change each others’ minds in the best kind of character trajectory, the trajectory fueled by love: By falling in love, Kate recognizes that marrying a male version of her hard-charging self is not the key to happiness, and Jake stops tarring all women with the same brush; Kate learns to stop and smell the roses, and Jake faces that fact that there’s a difference between being centered and stagnating; Kate comes to redefine success on her own terms rather than others’ materialistic benchmarks, while Jake realizes that using his financial skills doesn’t require selling out.

    The book is so structured by mirrors and parallels, even I can see its geometric bones. Kate has a disastrous date with a fellow guest (Jake observes, “Dating you is like dating death”), then she fishes peacefully with Jake in a boat on a lake, then she has a bad date, then she boats with Jake. Kate thinks Jake is annoying, Jake thinks Kate is annoying. Kate begins to think of Jake as a brother. Jake beings to think of Kate as a sister. Kate starts realize Jake is hot. Jake begins to view Kate as hot. And so on.

    Kate and Jake’s relationship is mirrored by Will’s relationship with The Cabins’ social director, Valerie, which is not a actually secondary romance but a foil. Will and Valerie have been living together for years. Will thinks, selfishly, they are just shagging and Valerie, selfishly, wants to marry him for her career. Non-committal Will and ultra-calculating Valerie both treat each other as instruments, and they exemplify the dangers to Kate and Jake of allowing certain tendencies to flourish unchecked.

    I read this after I had read several other Crusie books, including Bet Me and Welcome to Temptation, which are widely considered to be her best romances.  I felt like I could see the seeds of those later, more complex books in Manhunting (although, if Wikipedia is to be believed, Crusie had written at least a first draft of Bet Me before Manhunting). A sophisticated literary critic might place greater value on those other, more complex books, with more issues, more characters, more plots and subplots, and more nuanced obstacles to love, but for me, Manhunting is like Crusie Straight Up: it has all the things I love about this author, without extras. It just zips along: a fun, funny, sexy read, not trying to be anything more than a story of two people who are perfect for each other and are the last to know.

    I don’t think this is a flawless book, if there is such a thing. For example, the connections drawn between career and character are just too broad [in RL, sometimes it's the small town shopkeepers who are the greedy assholes, and the captains of industry who practice lovingkindness], and I have to squirm my way through a scene where Jake schools Kate on the true meaning of feminism [In fact, Crusie's take on feminism is very present in many of her early books. I may write on that separately.]. But my love for this book is boundless nonetheless.

    I love this book for the humor, but also for the sexual tension. If there’s a better example of how to do sexual tension, I haven’t read it. Kate and Jake don’t even kiss until past the halfway point [something typical of Crusie's early books], but that doesn’t stop this from being one very sexy book. One of my favorite moments in the book is when Jake finds Kate skinny dipping, teases her, and she has the last laugh by striding out of the lake like a goddess, leaving him stunned. But the absolute best is when Jake realizes, in the middle of a game of pool, that he wants Kate, immediately and desperately. He keeps miscuing as images of Kate over the past few days flash though his mind. He finds her in the supply room, where she is simultaneously dealing with her own realization (see, that thing about mirroring).

    “Ben just beat me at pool.” He stood in front of her with his hands on his hips.

    “Good grief,” Kate said. “What did you do? Fall on your cue?”

    “I got distracted.”

    Jake leaned against the shelves, a hand on each side of her, and looked in to her eyes. She suddenly had trouble swallowing.

    “We seem to have been a little slow here, darlin’,” he said, and bent down to kiss her softly. Time stopped, and Kate felt his lips distinctly on hers, not as a blurred impact, but as Jake’s lips touching hers. This is Jake, she thought. Jake, Oh, my God.

    This is a deeply romantic book, tightly focused on one central message: we don’t love people because they instantiate a list of desirable qualities. We don’t get to choose whom to love, not really. We love someone because of some inexplicable combustion, emotional, sexual, and otherwise, that our connection generates. [This, again, is typical of Crusie.] Both Jake and Kate sought to retain control at the expense of experiencing love, but they drew each other out of comfort and into risk. It’s the delight of a good romance that the reader gets to experience the joy of risk rewarded, and I experience that every time I pick up this terrific little book.

    38 responses so far

    Monday Morning Stepback: Snowpocalypse edition!

    Dec 26 2010 Published by under Monday Morning Stepback

    The weekly links, opinion, and personal updates post

    Links

    My sons, no longer content to share review space with their mother DESPITE THE FACT THAT THEY CAME FROM MY WOMB started their own book review blog, ReadReactReviewJr. We’ve noticed that while there are loads of YA blogs and loads of mommy blogs that review kids books, there are few book blogs written by kids for kids. We’ll see how long they stick with it.

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    Also, I started a Facebook account for this blog (see right sidebar). So many people are on Facebook, pretty much all day long, that I think it may actually be easier for some to read this blog by clicking a FB link than to bookmark it or view it in their reader.

    I notice that some people have a “do not attempt to friend this person unless you know her personally”, and I have no idea what that means. Does it mean, “if you are a spammer stay away”, or does it mean, “you had really better know her IRL?”. And if the latter, what does that even mean? If I met a romance author at a conference, do I count? I’ve just been sending out friend requests, figuring people won’t reply if they don’t want to friend me. But let me know what you think. I am a pretty amateur Facebooker.

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    For your daily dose of sexual liberation, check out Hello Mom. Merry Christmas. I Write Erotica, at the Harlequin blog, by Tiffany Reisz.

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    Net neutrality confuses me no longer, thanks to this truly idiot proof graphic (via @Techmeme)

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    A Harvard Business Review blog post, You Can’t Multitask, So Stop Trying, is a decent read, but it’s actually more interesting for watching an academic try to engage with aggressive seasoned internet commentators. I am not sure why commenters got so mad at the post author, Paul Atchley, Ph.D., an associate professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of Kansas, but one of them actually looked up and criticized his publication record. Ouch.

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    In case you agree with Atchley, here’s the 99%’s 10 Online Tools for Better Attention and Focus.

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    Not new, but new to me: Like A Virgin, by Emily Maguire, in Australia’s The Monthly, concluding with this (via @bookthingo):

    The ways in which virginity matters in the long-past-virginal adult world is altogether different. The silly, superstitious, dehumanising, backwardness of the virginity obsession would be funny if it didn’t so often result in pain, shame, oppression and exploitation. We know – don’t we? – that the porn hymens are fake, that sex with a virgin doesn’t cure AIDS, that no mystical change occurs in either man or woman when a penis enters a previously unpenetrated vagina. We know – don’t we? – that teenage girls have erotic lives that are entirely unconnected and unconcerned with the fantasies of middle-aged men; that a woman’s identity, sense of self and value as a human being cannot be instantly and irrevocably altered by a single sexual encounter. And we know – don’t we? – that virginity is a human invention, that we are the ones who invest it with meaning, even as we’re unable to accurately or consistently define it.

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    It’s fun to watch a smart and sympathetic semi-newbie to the genre try to make sense of it, and it’s also gratifying to see a leading lit blog discuss romance. See Ron Hogan do both here, in a post on Christmas romances.

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    At FWD (Feminists with Disabilities), seriously one of the best blogs out there, Blindness in Greek Myth:

    Greek myth is characterised by myriad meanings and functions of blindness. Whether blindness is representing establishment or exercise of power dynamics, whether it appears as a metaphor, whether it is performing a variety of functions all at once or something else entirely, blindness is everywhere in Greek myth.

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    An interesting round up of discussions on whether to allow comments on blogs at Language Log. Perhaps my favorite point comes in the comments, and it is this:

    When a narcissistic blowhard makes an ignorant comment on the Internet, there’s little or no cause to take note, so if a reaction ensues, it’s because there was a second fool willing to take the invitation.

    Sometimes the best way to protect free speech is to shut up.

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    Loads of best of the year lists to peruse. So many great ideas. I am actually thinking of starting a new feature, Top Ten Tuesdays, where I review a random book chosen from a best of 2010 list. I was especially interested in this one by Maria Lokken at the B&N blog, and KMont’s 2010 roundup at Lurv a la Mode.

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    A pretty interesting video segment on book covers from CBS Sunday Morning, including some discussion of romance, chick lit, and the Twilight Saga, Larssen, and the impact of e-books (via Cover Cafe)

    Opinion

    I am fresh out of these. Any ideas?

    Personal

    We’re bracing for the blizzard. I am reading and rereading a lot of Jenny Cruise, so expect nothing but Crusie posts this week, and maybe into the next.

    For the folks that asked for it, I added an “I like this” button to the bottom of each post. We’ll see if it sticks. (Sorry the font is so small. Working on it.)

    HAPPY WEEK!

    16 responses so far

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