Maybe This Time

Crusie's acknowledgements at the beginning thanks the people who "beta read." Has this piece of fanish terminology become mainstream? Is Crusie a fan?

The first page before before the main story starts (I presume this has a name? What is it called?) says "This book is set in 1992. Because" and I kept on getting distracted by trying to figure out what the "because" was. At first I assumed it was because Crusie had written it then, failed to quite complete/sell it, and when she pulled it out in 2009 realized the plot wouldn't work if it was modernized, because everyone now has cellphones.

Then, as I was reading it, I decided that couldn't be it, because there's not a lot of "out of contact" obstacles that couldn’t be replaced with "out of service," so perhaps it's just that the musical references would have had to be updated, or else her characters made twenty years older, which perhaps makes the book less mainstream?

What does it mean for a review when you spend half your time talking about the authors' notes? Anyway.

This book, with the exception of the supernatural elements, reminds me of earlier Crusie more than her later stuff (which also supports my 'written in 1992 thesis') but perhaps that is just because this was not written with Bob Myer, as her more recent books have been.

ACTUAL BOOK-RELEVANT PLOT DISCUSSION FOLLOWS.

The romantic pairing in this book are a couple who divorced ten years ago when they discovered that their sexual chemistry was great, but they were bad at communicating with each other. In a less talented writer's hands, this would have resulted in my spending the entire book shrieking "TALK TO EACH OTHER," but with Crusie writing, the working out of their relationship comes not because they finally blurt out the missing piece of information they have been bone-headedly concealing all this time, but because they have since grown up.

They get together because he needs someone to look after a pair of children he inherits, and he hires her not because her ovaries qualify her, but because she is an English teacher and they need a tutor. (Also because he luuuuurves her.) The children are delightful, which I mean not in the saccharine Shirley Temple kind of way, but rather they delight me by being dysfunctional in the way real children are, doing such things as having screaming fits when you try to feed them waffles.

If "supernatural romances" are not your thing, you may enjoy this one anyway, as the ghosts have strong individual personalities, like all Crusie characters, and it is their personalities that motivate them.

This book completely lacks a dog, and I didn't care while I was reading it, so that's certainly a strong endorsement from me.

Two things detracted from my enjoyment of this book: The character of Kelly, evil girlfriend, was so straight-up "ambitious woman is evil bitch" that she was like Miranda Priestly without any style or magnificence.

And at one point, a ghost possesses someone to initiate a sexual encounter, and when someone calls this rape, it is dismissed because the woman being possessed would have initiated the sexual encounter anyway.

I don't usually see much point in arguing which impossibly fictional phenomenon are or aren't rape; it seems a distraction from the actual fact of rape. But in this instance, it super-bothered me how easily the fact that it was at very least "rape-like" was swept aside.

When MAYBE THIS TIME arrived on my doorstep, it was all I could do not to start reading it right away. I think I lasted maybe an hour or two before cracking it open. Having read all of Jennifer Crusie’s previous works, I, along with many others, I imagine, was nearly frothing at the mouth when I heard of a solo, non-collaboration book. I’m happy to report that MAYBE THIS TIME was as good as I had hoped it to be; while I was reading it, that was all I wanted to be doing. In fact, I stayed up half the night just to finish it (and then was up the other half because I thought there was a ghost in my hallway).

I’ll admit I wasn’t sure how I felt about the ghost part of the storyline. I’m on board with anything Crusie wants to write, but I like my romance a little more grounded than ghosts generally deliver. As someone who doesn’t generally believe in ghosts, I went into the book not believing; I thought sure it would turn out that there was someone playing a joke on the “big city folk” who had come to this small town to Save The Children. Without giving too much away, I will say that is not the case. I will also say that as someone who doesn’t believe in ghosts, Crusie managed to creep me out in the middle of the night. Thanks, Jenny!

One of my favorite romance tropes is when the hero and heroine know each other prior to the beginning of the book. I think things move along faster and are generally more believable when the characters have a history. Andie and North definitely have a history; they were married for a year, ten years ago. They met and married each other within hours—something that didn’t make any sense and didn’t ring particularly true to me, until I realized Andie and North were Dharma and Greg. Andie is a little less free-spirited than Dharma, but still a complete opposite to the staid, buttoned-up North. It was no wonder their marriage didn’t last more than a year, and even though ten years has passed, the spark that connected the two of them is still very much ignited. I loved watching Andie and North find their way back to each other.

I also liked the range of secondary characters that populated the MAYBE THIS TIME world. That is not to say, however, that I liked all of the characters. I hated Kelly, who seemed to be based on Nancy Grace. I wasn’t a fan of May, right up until I started actively hating her. Even Alice got on my nerves. But, the difference between me disliking these characters and disliking characters crafted by other less talented authors, is that I didn’t like Kelly, May, and Alice because I still wouldn’t like them if they were in line behind me at a store. They were real people, much more than characters on a page that just don’t ring true. On the contrary, they ring very true, and I didn’t find them likeable. They weren’t unlikable, however, because of poor writing; I think it was actually great writing that made them so awful. If that makes sense.

My one complaint, and this is less about MAYBE THIS TIME and more about Crusie’s writing, is that as I was reading, I felt as though these characters had the same dialogue tendencies that I’ve seen in her previous books. That is to say, while I thought the characters were full-bodied and well-drawn, I also thought that if you compared Andie or North with other characters from previous books, you’d find very similar speech patterns among the characters. I guess you could call it Crusie’s trademark wit, or snappy dialogue, but I found it distracting.

Overall, MAYBE THIS TIME made me want more Jenny Crusie books. I know she’s not interested in writing straight romance anymore, but this fan wishes she would reconsider! At any rate, I suspect I’ll be reading whatever she feels like writing for as long as she continues to write.

Originally posted at Romance Reader at Heart