Jennifer Crusie "Tell Me Lies"

You mom's of school age kids out there will know of what I speak when I say, May Has Hit. I used to think of May as a wonderful spring month of gardening and walking. Maybe hunting for morels and eating a lot of asparagus. But slowly over the last few years the end-of-school-year nature of May has come more and more front and center. Ah, enough excuses.

Tell Me Lies is about Maddie and C.L. and the small town of Frog Point Well, really it's about Maddie. We find Maddie cleaning out her husband's car and finding black lace panties under the seat. Since he cheated on her five years ago, she naturally jumps to certain conclusions and decides she really is going to leave him this time, she's tired of being the good girl in town, and she and her husband haven't loved or liked each other in a while anyway.

C.L. is the only other guy she "dated" in high school. He comes back into town to look into her husband's books as a favor to an old friend and gets thrown into a very strange kerfuffle with Maddie and her husband. Were there funny moments in the book, definitely BUT...there were a few too many moments where Maddie had to be Too Stupid To Live in order to further the plot. The plot really takes over the book and that might have been okay except it just didn't hang together well. And my other big complaint was C.L. He was a card board cut out character par excellence. His interactions with the daughter were the most interesting parts of his character and they were so damn perfect they made me snort. A puppy? Really?

If you aren't expecting much or reading to carefully this one is amusing.

Contemporary Romance 1998: 3 of 5 bags of money.

Crusie & Mayer 'Don't Look Down'

Clearly taking sociology is bad for my brain. (I feel compelled, as a brain surgery survivor, to point out that the last statement is a joke.) I was so intrigued by Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer's website that I had to get their first collaboration, Don't Look Down. Let me start by saying, I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

But what struck me was how I was not judging it by my typical romance novel standards. I think I was very entertained by the whole male vs female perspective/writing style thing. For example, I'm coming to realize that a successful romance novel for me generally involves a less than emotionally realistic male character. He needs to be smart and witty, sure, but he also needs to be (eventually) completely devoted to the heroine, whether he understands why he clearly needs her or not.

In this book, the hero is more emotionally realistically male, which fascinated me, but it didn't help me understand why he wants to be with Lucy (aside from physical attraction of course.) He's interested in Lucy, but why exactly? And truthfully if his attraction to Lucy is under question, why does she want him, other than the hero stuff. On the other hand, it's well written, decent plot, I liked the combat/survival stuff.

The sociology angle comes in that while I was reading this book, we were talking about classifications of people; why do we use the categories we do when describing someone? Gender, age, race, sexual orientation; and not, say, handedness or "ass man or breast man" for instance. That got a lot of chuckles from the men in the class. And I was reading an article about the 'hook up' scene on college campus's at the same time. This pattern of sexual contact first, relationship later, acknowledges human sexual needs but seems to be viewed differently by the two genders. Men appear to use it to satisfy sexual needs first, while allowing for the possibility that a relationship might develop, whereas women seem to use the pattern primarily to open the pathway for a relationship and secondarily to satisfy purely sexual needs.

So, why do young men engage in relationships? (And yes, I'm addressing the generic male, the group not the individual.) If being a husband and possibly a father is so dauntingly tied to being a good provider and heavy responsibility, and if young men are genuinely stymied when asked to look at their own emotional needs or to understand interpersonal relationships, why do they get involved with girls? Especially if they are in a social setting where sex is available without an emotional commitment. Really, this is a serious question.....

Oh, and back to the book, really liked it. Didn't love it. Contemporary Romance 2006: 4 of 5 Moot points.