Getting Rid of Bradley by Jennifer Crusie

[lightreads]

Getting Rid of Bradley by Jennifer Crusie

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


School teacher divorces her husband, and promptly gets shot at and dragged into his embezzlement case, except she also lands herself a cop for protection.

Not feeling it. The whole thing felt rushed and phoned in, but more to the point, this is one of those romances where all two people have to do is meet. Everything else just happens. I realize this is, like 80% of the romance genre, but I was just not in the mood for a story about how all you need to do to achieve lifelong romantic happiness is show up. As opposed to, I dunno, work hard at it and compromise and be thoughtful and your best self. Everyone who knows the story of how my girlfriend and I got together is now pointing and laughing, and okay, fair. But I still have a point!




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Comments

[kate_nepveu]

Would you like Crusie recs, or are you good?

[lightreads]

I would like, thanks! I've been picking nearly at random.

[kate_nepveu]

Okay!

My biases are that a lot of times I think she has a surfeit of plot and occasionally is a little grimmer than I want (though, as I think I mentioned, I love _Agnes_, so it's more a tone thing than a body count thing). Also I haven't read most of these for 5+ years.

Originally published as category romances:

_Manhunting_: despite the title and being her first novel, I have a real soft spot for it; it has a nice "gradually becoming friends, oh wait I want to jump your bones" thing going.

_Charlie All Night_: the one where the couple sleeps together right away, then become platonic friends, then fall in love. Set in a radio station, has some weirdness with a drug subplot that I'm pretty sure doesn't work any more.

_Anyone But You_: the one where she's 40 and he's 30 (she cares about the age difference, he doesn't).

_The Cinderella Deal_: the one where they pretend to be a couple, and then they go back to their lives, except then they miss each other.

Originally published as non-category romances:

_Fast Women_: the one about marriage and divorce, set partly in a detective agency; a little on-the-nose thematically and not entirely optimally paced, but on the whole better balanced than most of her non-categories.

. . . actually, that's it. (You're already read _Bet Me_. I haven't read _Maybe This Time_ yet but I'm told it uses slut-shaming as rape apologism.)

Well, okay, I should probably give _Welcome to Temptation_ (small-town politics and murder) and _Faking It_ (art fraud, forgery, murder) another try--they are slightly linked by characters--but I kind of felt the murders weren't well-integrated and the latter had about 25% too many characters. On the other hand I still remember stuff from them, which is more than I can say about some of the other books not on this list.