Fun!

• Date: 27.01.2008
• Book: The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes
• Author: mellysue

Review

I love and adore Jennifer Crusie and I’m usually in line to purchase her books on the day they come out but I waited to buy this and I’ll tell you why: I’m not a fan of books that are written by more than one author and I’m not a huge fan of anthologies. I had never read anything by Anne Stuart and I had never even heard of Eileen Dreyer, so I decided to wait a while until I had some extra money.

I’m sorry that I was so quick to judge — this is a very fun and fast-paced novel, one of the hallmarks of a fabulous Crusie novel. At first, I wasn’t able to tell which author wrote each character but as soon as Mare’s story got going, I could pick out Crusie’s voice very easily. That didn’t mean that Lizzie and Dee were not as fun or well-written, but after reading everything I can get my hands Crusie-wise and then reading it again, it was easy to pick out her contributions.

The reason that I gave it an A- is simply that I felt in some ways the stories were just a little too fast. It takes place over a weekend and usually, I can overlook that sort of thing. A great number of romance novels take place over a short amount of time and the mark of a really fabulous author is to make you forget that everything you just read happened in a matter of days. I wasn’t able to get there. Mare’s story was easier to believe because her true love was a man from her past and I could believe her story having a resolution in about forty-eight hours.

But it was hard to buy Lizzie and Elric and Dee and Danny in particular. I just didn’t feel it. I could feel they were very attracted to each other but I just couldn’t see their resolution as neatly. The authors were trying to submerge you into this entire world and I just never quite had a handle on it.

In the end though, it was well-written, the characters were fun and easy to read and I would not have minded longer books (or even a trilogy with a different book from a different author). Even if some aspects of the book were not exactly what I wanted, I still enjoyed it thoroughly and now I have two new authors to track down.