So to begin I have to say that I fell into the same trap as many others did in that I read "Bet Me" first, my first ever Crusie book actually and adored it. I practically sprinted to the library and got every Crusie book they had and schlepped the entire armful out to the car with barely contained glee. Glee I tell you.My next read was "Agnes and the Hitman" which was cute and occasionally funny but whereas I loved "Bet Me" I only liked "Agnes." Undaunted, though, because "Agnes" is a collaboration with another author and I thought that might have been the reason Crusie's charm was so toned down, I picked up "Temptation" off the teetering stack and started to read.I was kind of interested in the con man aspect but it didn't appear often enough in my opinion. I also thought the main love interest was a really self important jerk, solidified by the fact that he has a daughter whom he barely spends time with. At nearly 40 years old he LIVES WITH HIS MOTHER. Yeah you read that right. This supposed epitome of sexiness and charm lives with his mom who he lets raise his daughter because apparently he's too busy downing beers at the local tavern and chasing women to raise her himself.Then we have Sophie who's in town to shoot an audition tape with her, what?, ex sister in law? It's never really clear. But it's the B movie actress who dumped her brother some time back so why on Earth Sophie and her sister would bother with helping Clea do anything at all other than sleep with the fishes is beyond me.But they follow Clea into Temptation, Ohio, home of the world's largest phallic symbol water tower, it's even painted peach, and are so mesmerized by the giant penis that they crash into some of Temptation's more illustrious citizens. Which results in the arrogant mayor and the townie cop going to their farmhouse to interview them.And here's a part that's weird because we're not sure how much Clea is paying Sophie and Amy to make this movie, if she's paying them anything at all, but suddenly in addition to shooting they all decide to paint and wallpaper Clea's farmhouse that she's going to sell.That didn't make a damn bit of sense to me. I'm as helpful as the next person, I swear, but unless I'm getting paid, I'm not lifting a finger to help out my ex-sister in law who dumped my brother. I'm just not that good of a person. But I think that's just supposed to be an illustration of Sophie's martyr complex, that she takes care of everyone around her but no one takes care of her. You can easily see that this is just a plot device to make Sophie fall in love with the farmhouse.One night Sophie, Amy, and the ex-sis head to the local tavern where Sophie gets blitzed and the male lead goes down on her. Then when she sobers up and remembers that, oh yeah, she left a boyfriend in Cincinatti, Phin (dumbest name ever) says, "Oh hey, baby. No problem. Oral sex isn't sex anyway. Chillax." And is that what you want to hear from your male lead? Really? Oral sex isn't sex? Because this is a romance. And romance by definition have a HEA. So do I want my heroine to end up with a guy who's gonna get blown by a hot chick while shopping for tools at the Home Depot and come home to tell Sophie, "It's not a big deal. Oral doesn't count, hon." No, I do not. Phin seems to be shockingly lax in the morals department, not raising his daughter, seducing drunk women and then walking away saying it's not even sex. Which is fine if you're writing a rake/womanizer type character who at some point sees the error of his ways. But Phin never does. So you know he's going to get the BJ sometime in the future and Sophie's going to lose her mind about it.It's kind of a whole cast of crappy characters. The only nice person in the whole novel seems to be the cop. More than half the people are semi-cheating on everyone else, in public, just to get back at their significant other. Sophie's sister is leaving her high and dry to go to L.A. and it will kill their video business when she goes, leaving Sophie flat broke. But Amy doesn't care where that leaves Sophie. Parents are busy manipulating their children into unwanted relationships like their kids are their own personal chess pawns. "Honey I know Phin's running all over town having sex in public with that movie skank, but he needs a son and you need to settle down at the ripe old age of 20 so of course you'll still be marrying him when he gets the skank out of his system." Are you kidding me? There aren't a lot of characters to like here.Meanwhile, back in Temptation, Sophie takes Phin home to have sex and ends up having to break up with her boyfriend's answering machine because he won't pick up the phone to let her dump him properly. Once that pesky task is done Phin's all for the 'cheap sex' as he calls it. But he should have called it 'boring sex', because it was. No really. That's not just me talking. They have to stop going at it because in the middle Sophie was so bored she was counting the cracks in the ceiling tiles and even Phin, who'd hump a granny's leg, thought that was just a little too awkward.Speaking of awkward, they wait til Sophie's sister Amy comes back from the bar and Phin pins down Sophie and starts doing her while simultaneously throwing around lamps in order to get Amy to walk in on them having sex.And here's where it totally collapsed for me. Because this guy is the MAYOR and a FATHER, and THIRTY SIX YEARS OLD and he really shouldn't be acting like a drunk frat boy through the whole novel. But then again he lives with his mommy, so maybe he's acting out.Here's the thing. I like kinky sex as much as the next girl. More than the next girl. You'll just have to trust me on this. But it's jarring when it's a grown father who's acting a fool in his very, very small town. What's going to happen when his 9 year old daughter is told by other kids at school "I saw your daddy having sex with some skank"? You can't keep your exhibitionist tendencies under wraps for the sake of your kid?A lot of the dialogue is movie quotes, which seem cute at first, but then you realize this is a substitute for REAL dialogue and it becomes annoying. There are far too many movie references in general especially since I have seen some of them and the point the author is trying to make by drawing parallels to these movies is lost on me. I don't want to have to watch a dozen movies to understand the book I'm reading. This happened in "Agnes", too, the male lead sometimes referencing classic movies, but it wasn't quite as pervasive in that book.Also, the plot itself is pretty damn stupid because, look, I'm all for women being empowered at any age and "I am woman, hear me roar" and all that, but the reality is NO ONE wants to see a fifty year old porn star. NO ONE. And the plot is mostly about a fifty year old ex porn star trying to make soft core porn for a comeback and her old hardcore porn producer is trying to get her to scrap the soft porn and come to the dark side for one last romp. Again, NO producer is going to make a deal with a fifty year old to do porn. Anyway, I skimmed a little after the halfway point and by that time I had to sit up and say to myself, "Self, you know you can't finish this book." So I put the book down and now it's one of my few Did-Not-Finish reads. I know how it ends because I skimmed the last two chapters but, yeah, there's that large chunk toward the end that I didn't bother to read.I have in my hands "Getting rid of Bradley" also by Crusie and since her novels have gone from Great to Good to Did-Not-Finish this is her fourth and final chance. I still have a stack of her books on my shelf that I got from the library, but I'm pretty sure I read the best two she'll ever write ("Bet Me" and "Agnes"). Wish me luck!
This was one of the first contemporary romances I ever read, and new to this genre, failed to appreciate as I should have. Firstly, because I had no scale to gauge romances and secondly because I was (and admittedly still am) somewhat prejudiced against the genre. For the most part I think my old reservations against most books of the genre still stand: they are sexist, conservative and often promote unfeminist values in the guise of liberating female sexuality. I mean you just have to read books like Twilight or Fifty Shades of Gray to see what I mean. Is that the ideal that we hold up to for women? Historical romances are often no better, for if they try to follow in the footsteps of Pride and Prejudice it is only to focus on the element of Elizabeth getting Darcy and a big house, but forgetting all the (admittedly) subtle critique of the bourgeoisie and patriarchy that is the foundational element of that seemingly light and frothy romance.I am glad, then, to have discovered Jennifer Crusie, who tries to avoid some of these pitfalls. It is through her that I discovered that genre romance is not all about repeating the same archetypes in different settings. Not all of her novels work as well (some of her most recent ones leave a bit to be desired), but she is quite sensitive to power dynamics, and it is clear that she tries to work through them. It helps that she has a voice and a "style" (gasp!), so exceptional in genre-novels. In fact, her books often read (to me) like screwball comedies from the 40s with its Katherine Hepburns and Cary Grants. She's got the "show, don't tell" adage down so well, that I sometimes have a feeling of actually watching a film rather than reading a book. It also helps that she has an amazing sense of humour, and of timing, which is essential to the former. Indeed I believe that she's a playwright who found herself writing novels instead.Welcome to Temptation is not even my favourite of her books, that title would go to What the Lady Wants, one of the best examples of film-noir-screwball-comedy in contemporary romance, or even to the sequel of Welcome to Temptation, Faking It which reminds me a lot of Peter O' Toole and Audrey Hepburn's How to Steal a Million, but with both characters being very loveable reformed crooks. But being the first one I read by her, I have a soft spot for Temptation.In this book, the woman comes from a very cool family of con-men (and women) and meets in small-town Temptation with a very uncool Mayor, where she may or may not be shooting a porn-film. The woman hates town-boys and the man is wary of femmes-fatales. The woman is high-strung and unable to stand up for herself and her wants, and gets roped into schemes she doesn't want to be part of, while the man cannot be bothered to make an effort to stand up for his values and constantly cedes to his powerful mother and the rest of the town-council so as to not make ripples, and ends up passing policies that he's actually against. What they discover with each other is not just sexual attraction but the fact that they could only stand up for each other by standing up for themselves and what they believe in. It is in being forced out of their innate passivity which has so far made them continually concede to the demands of others that they fall in love. And this transition is done with such humour and aplomb that at no point you feel that endless angst that unfortunately characterises much romance, though there were a few points where I had to hide my face in my hands in embarrassment!I won't say much more about this book, but if you're looking for romances that do not leave you cringing at the end, I recommend Jennifer Crusie's. Also, if you're a fan of classic Hollywood, be prepared to find numerous allusions, which make the reading quite rich, and inexorably point to her inspiration.
What do You think about Welcome To Temptation (2004)?
As in this painting, the temptations of the small Midwestern town conveniently named Temptation were not apparent to me. That's ok; one thing I appreciate about Crusie is how she creates characters who are attractive to and romantic with one another specifically, as individuals, rather than being idealized in generically sexy ways. I was willing to buy that this mayor jerk (despite encumbering bitch mother and precocious daughter) and this rotting, ill-decorated house in this boring, oppressively conservative, horrible humid small town were what Sophie wanted even if they all sounded like Hell to me. Oh, but Temptation is supposed to lead us to Hell! Maybe this is all a secret coded religious message about avoiding Temptation? Mm, probably not, but I'll avoid the town just in case.
—Miriam
23 March 2015: $3.99 on KindleReview cross-posted from hereI've read this book many times over the years. It's not my favorite by Crusie (that would be Bet Me), but it is one that I come back to frequently.I've said recently that I don't think "humourous" books are for me, and I still think that's true because I stumble over most of them, but the humour in this one works for me. It's a little bit more subtle and doesn't feel forced (unlike some others I've read). But it's the dynamics between family and friends and lovers that Ms. Crusie really captures well. Their connections were so well shown that it engendered a connection to me. Dialogue is crisp, and conversations are real.What draws me back to this book the most though is the pure fun of it. That's not something I'd normally think of a book with a murder mystery and blackmail in it, but when you add in ice cream, accidentally making porn, a con-dog, pool (as in billiards), movie quotes, lots of music and more it really can't help but being fun.
—Angela
As I've come to expect, Crusie turns out another romance that may not be great literature, but is a near perfect example of the genre.Sophie and Phin are a great pairing, with both chemistry and a lot of humor. The supporting cast is entertaining, even if some of the Crusie archetypes show up yet again. (The lead man does not have an older brother this time, but as always, his mother's an ice queen.) We've got another plot moppet in the form of Phin's daughter, but she's cute enough and not overused enough to be endearing rather than annoying. And while I was never particularly interested in the B couple, the unexpected C couple involving the porn magnate was surprisingly sweet.The murder is very much one of those "anyone could have done it" kinds of things, and plays out with suitable chaos. One of the things that I really appreciate about Crusie, though, is that she doesn't drag things out by having people be stupid. When problems could easily be solved by two people having a thirty second conversation, she doesn't come up with stupid reasons why they don't have it. Instead, they sit down, have the conversation, and then she builds interesting plot twists out of the ramifications. So when, say, A tells B that C doesn't want to ever speak to B again, instead of having B and C pine for each other for half a book, they pine for half a chapter. Then C asks B why he isn't talking to her, B explains, and C gets pissed at A. Which is actually way more interesting than the standard "oh woe why won't he talk to me he must hate me therefore I should respect his wishes and needlessly avoid him in increasingly convoluted ways" thing that gets really old. Her characters are smart, they share information when appropriate, and so you do a lot less yelling at the book, saying "Just talk to each other for 30 seconds! God!"So: sensible characters, entertaining courtship, liberally sprinkled humor, reasonably hot sex scenes, satisfying comeuppance, believable happily-ever-after. Pretty much everything you could want in a romance.
—Rebecca
