Skip to main content

Maybe This Time by Jennifer Crusie

Genre: Romance, paranormal thriller
Year of publication: 2010
Setting & time: Ohio, USA, 1992

Andie Miller is trying to tie up some loose ends in her life before accepting her boyfriend's proposal of marriage, but when she goes to see her ex-husband, North Archer, to return to him 10 years worth of uncashed alimony checks, he surprises her by offering her a hefty sum of money to go and look after his wards, two orphaned children, in an isolated house for a month. The children seem afraid to leave the house and the last nanny who went to look after them fled, claiming it was haunted.

Andie immediately clashes with the creepy housekeeper and discovers that there are indeed ghosts in the house. When various people, including North, a ratings-hungry TV reporter, a sceptical parapsychologist and a psychic, descend on the house with different purposes in mind, the ghosts get restless, and it is going to take more than just a séance to put things to rights.

This is not the best Crusie novel I have read, but it is not the worst either. As always, the writing is solid and skilful, but for some reason I was unable to connect with either North or Andie. North is not as well fleshed out as he should be - his cardboard content is a bit too high for my taste - and Andie is just a slightly better tempered, more stable version of Cranky Agnes from Agnes and the Hitman. The attractively ugly animals were getting a bit tired, so it was a joy to see them left out entirely. The ghosts are well-done and the story is full of the usual twists and turns and it gets truly spooky towards the end. This is a well written and interesting modern take on The Turn of the Screw, but for the reasons stated above I can only give it 3 stars.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down
Post a Comment
Read more

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove
Post a Comment
Read more

Icelandic folk-tale: The Devil Takes a Wife

Stories of people who have made a deal with and then beaten the devil exist all over Christendom and even in literature. Here is a typical one: O nce upon a time there were a mother and daughter who lived together. They were rich and the daughter was considered a great catch and had many suitors, but she accepted no-one and it was the opinion of many that she intended to stay celebrate and serve God, being a very devout  woman. The devil didn’t like this at all and took on the form of a young man and proposed to the girl, intending to seduce her over to his side little by little. He insinuated himself into her good graces and charmed her so thoroughly that she accepted his suit and they were betrothed and eventually married. But when the time came for him to enter the marriage bed the girl was so pure and innocent that he couldn’t go near her. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t sleep and needed a bath in order to go to sleep. A bath was prepared for him and in he went and
Post a Comment
Read more