Single Girl Lit - Reviewed February 2010

This single girl chick lit gave me some feelings. The storyline could have been good but I’m not sure I liked it at all.

Two sisters travel to Temptation to make a film for their brother’s ex-girlfriend, Clea, who wants to jump start her acting career. Temptation is Clea’s home town and they all move in to her old farmhouse to make her movie. The sisters seem to be carrying a lot of secrets which develop throughout the novel and help to make up the action parts of the story.

There are quite a few people involved and some of them seemed unnecessary to the plot. We spend a lot of time developing the relationship of one of the sisters with the mayor of Temptation which leaves much of the rest of the plot sort of hanging in limbo for the first 200 pages. I really had no idea what was supposed to be happening until the middle of the book- it was a long read to get to the action and I found this incredibly annoying. The action portion was good -but overly complicated in getting there.

Perhaps I didn’t relate to it because I found very few of the characters appealing or in-depth enough to keep me interested. The actress, Clea, is a key person in the action plot but we know very little about her, she rarely has any speaking parts and she doesn’t seem to have much appeal. I did like the mayor and his daughter and even liked quite a few of the townspeople…but not enough.

All in all though this novel didn’t make me think very happy thoughts!

Jennifer Crusie has large following with many published novels and I thought we’d give her a try after having read some great reviews but unfortunately I was disappointed with this book. It didn’t meet my expectations given many of the reviews I read, but it could be that I just wasn’t as interested in this style of story.

I started to enjoy the book more towards the end, but felt getting there was hard work, which is not what I look for in a novel. I wasn’t sure how I felt about the relationship that developed and how many characters I had to figure out and wasn’t sure they were even necessary to the story, although towards the end when a small town mystery develops I found out why they were hanging around.
I couldn’t appreciate the main characters or relate to them on any level and found the plot to be slow in moving along. There’s loads of sex in this novel which I have no idea is part of her appeal or if she does this in every novel, so if you’re looking for a embellished Harlequin type novel with some twists and turns and many characters this might fit the bill.

Overall, I was disappointed and sadly may shy away from Crusie’s novels in the future.