MAYBE THIS TIME

Author: Jennifer Crusie ISBN: 9780312303785 8/2010 CONTEMP/PARANORMAL Publisher: ST. MARTIN'S PRESS

Andie Miller is ready to move on with her life. She wants to marry her fiancé and leave behind everything in her past, especially her ex-husband, North Archer. But when Andie tries to gain closure with him, he asks one final favor of her. A distant cousin has died and left North the guardian of two orphans who have driven away three nannies already, and things are getting worse. He needs someone to take care of the situation, and he knows Andie can handle anything.... When Andie meets the two children, she realizes the situation is much worse than she feared. Carter and Alice aren’t your average delinquents, and the creepy old house where they live is being run by the worst housekeeper since Mrs. Danvers. Complicating matters is Andie’s fiancé’s suspicion that this is all a plan by North to get Andie back. He may be right because Andie’s dreams have been haunted by North since she arrived at the old house. And that’s not the only haunting.... 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 just turn out differently....

RRAH's THOUGHTS AND PONDERINGS:

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.

Jilian Vallade