Bet Me

Rating:
Summary: A delightful book
Review: Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie is a fairy tale come to life.

Minerva Dobbs gets dumped and overhears a bet that (...) Calvin Morrisey makes about her going to dinner with him. The dinner doesn't go very well but they keep getting thrown together.

Bet me is a delightful read form beginning to end. Love is never easy but Min and Cal show us it's worth it.

Bet me is a keeper and a favorite.

Rating:
Summary: A delightful read
Review: Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie is a fairy tale come to life.

Minerva Dobbs gets dumped and overhears a bet that sexy Calvin Morrisey makes about her going to dinner with him. The dinner doesn't go very well but they keep getting thrown together.

Bet me is a delightful read form beginning to end. Love is never easy but Min and Call show us it's worth it.

Bet me is a keeper and a favorite.

Rating:
Summary: Bet Me is a spunky and charming novel
Review: Bet Me is a fabulous book. Though it had a rough start, it really picked up towards the end. The main plot of the book is about Minerva Dobbs, a practical, sworn off of men, carb counter, who is being swooned by Cal. Cal is a serial dater that always wins his bets. When Cal recieves a bet to try to make Min fall in love with him, his world goes crazy. To make it worse, Min knows about the bet. First, they argue over everything and decide not to see each other, but fate has other plans. Where ever they go, they accidently bump into each other. They each finally realize that they love one another. Min tells Cal that she knows about the bet and he decides to throw it, but Min decides the prize is to great to risk. Ten thousand dollars and true love is too precious to let go.

Rating:
Summary: Not her best ... but still pretty good
Review: Bet Me is quite similar to the wonderful Welcome to Temptation - Little League, icy mothers, difficult sisters, improbably handsome hero, stray animals - but still very enjoyable, with witty dialogue and a fun plot. I do think, though, that once you've read several Crusie novels you notice the same phrases and expressions cropping up. I think she's a brilliant writer but I'd like to see her do something more original. How about it, Jennifer?

Rating:
Summary: mikeknox.com
Review: Cal bets his booze hounds buddies that he can get his ex booty call into bet and goes so far as to bet them 10 grand he can do it in a month. Cal is such a heel. I mean doesn't he know how many [prostitutes] he can get in TJ for 10 grand and I really don't think he has the money. His best friend Jules told me that he's going to have to borrow it from his Target visa if he loses.

Rating:
Summary: Read and re-read
Review: Crusie is the best in contemporary romantic fiction- but you've got to like some laughs; if passionate pathos and despair are your thing, you won't be pleased. Bet Me is at the top of my list of her books, though Faking It and Welcome to Temptation are duking it out for pure entertainment value. Her dialogue and situations are outstanding. Her books step on the edges of suspension of disbelief without ever going near the shores of Dynasty type writing. Her characters are fully rounded with flaws, families and friends that just make us like them more. Reading a Crusie novel is the best form of escapism. She has a fabulous sense of humor and her heros are perfect for being so far from perfect and therefore believable fantasies. She writes a sex scene like no one else. The hero is never virile and unbelievably potent and the gasps usually (initially) come from something stuck in the cushions under the couch. Then they deal. The most unlikely, yet lovely, aspect is that her heros want to talk and figure out how to do better in the future. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: If this were another author, I'd rate it five stars
Review: Don't get me wrong. I highly recommend this book because Jennifer Crusie is among a very small circle of writers who are consistently funny. The caliber of her writing transcends the romance genre. Add in her ability to write comic, yet sexy love scenes and the circle grows even smaller. If this were the first Crusie I was reading, I'd be jumping up and down for joy in discovering this writer. She's that good.

I read "Bet Me" in one setting, and I enjoyed it. It's funny and witty and fast-paced. The small feeling of dissatisfaction I felt after reading it was the sense that the story could have been more. This is a return to a more romance-focused story than Crusie's later efforts and I missed that a little. The subplots involving Harry/Bink/Reynolds and Diana/Greg weren't as fully developed as Crusie's usual subplots, which are often so strong they threaten to overwhelm the major plot, but in a good way. I missed that in this book and I think Crusie missed the boat. The romance between Min and Cal wasn't enough story. It needed these subplots. The characters were there, the hint of conflict was there, Crusie had my interest but then their stories were cut short a little. That was my only complaint and it's a minor quibble.

Rating:
Summary: Laugh and Cry
Review: Excellent book. Better character development that usual. And I cannot remember the last time a book had me in both tears of laughter and tears of sympathy with the character. (probably "Good in Bed", which is high praise for Crusie!)

Rating:
Summary: My First (and not last) Crusie
Review: For months I've had "Bet Me" sitting on the top of my TBR pile. A good friend just raved about Jennifer Crusie, and since I'd turned her into a Suzanne Brockmann fan, she felt justified in turning me toward Crusie's collective works. So when I finally got around to opening this book, it was with great expectation.

I'm glad to say that I wasn't let down. "Bet Me" was such a treat to read. The humor was wonderful, and I was immediately taken with both the hero, Calvin Morrisey, and the heroine, Minerva Dobbs.

Instantly the characters had a chemistry with each other despite the fact that they both tried to fight it through nearly the entire book. What was exceptionally clever is how Crusie brought attention to this connection by using a secondary character - a psychologist ex-girlfriend of Cal's - to list clues indicating if the couple was developing feelings, only to have those very clues show up in Cal and Minerva's interactions with each other.

The only problems I had with this book were Minn's mother and Minn's obsession with her weight. Minn's mother was so extreme in her nastiness - in her complete fixation on her daughter's physical appearance and disapproval of same - that she almost came off as a cartoon character. I kept waiting for Minn to turn around and smack the woman, mother or not, especially given that Minn felt no compunction in speaking her mind to every other character. And while it was completely understandable why Minn herself was so obsessed with her weight, it really became annoying that it was such a significant obstacle between Cal and Minn. Cal never expressed anything but appreciation for Minn's figure, yet Minn could not let him forget that it was less than her definition of perfect.

Still, it was refreshing to read about a woman who didn't conform to society's (and romance readers') expectation of physical perfection and an amazing, sexy desirable man who loved her all the same. The dialogue between these two was wonderfully real, fast paced and at times, wicked. Once they allowed their passion to run free, the scenes were downright steamy.

I've already got a whole stack of Crusie's just begging to be read. I can only hope they are all as good as "Bet Me".


Rating:
Summary: Not her best work
Review: Generally speaking, I have thoroughly enjoyed all of Crusie's books. That being said, I was a bit disappointed in her latest work. While the references to Krispy Kreme doughnuts were funny (to a point), it seems as though Min would have straightened her mother out a long time ago regarding her food choices and her weight. I also agree with some of the other reviews that this isn't Crusie's best ensemble character development.

Fun to read, but not as much fun as it could have been. Let's hope she goes back to her previous self in future novels.