Scan barcode
A review by smudgebundle
Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie
1.0
A boring, meandering story of stupid people doing things over and over for almost 400 pages. I am so disappointed, as the premise and SOME of the descriptive context I liked a lot, but the execution was so tedious that I felt annoyed almost constantly.
The main characters are bizarrely infatuated with food, but not different food - chicken Marsala and donuts only. And they sexualize it in a way that I think was supposed to be fun and by halfway through the book seems to be just thrown in on every other page as mandatory, as if these people are required to talk about chicken Marsala as if it was a personality trait.
It feels like the author got bored with her own ideas before she even finished. For example, the cover of the book has a pair of sexy shoes. In the book, Cal loves Min’s shoes which are fun and unique, and he buys her a pair. There’s a bunch of discussion about it and then it just stops. By 3/4 of the way through the book, shoes are never mentioned again except In passing. They are not a part of the plot in almost any way, and when it is it’s cliche.
I also hate the writing. Several times I had to stop and reread a passage because there were 5 people talking all at once and the narration describes this so poorly that I couldn’t tell who was saying what to whom.
And finally, one poorly written sex scene thrown in at page 375 of 390 pages because they teased it so much that it was required but completely not worth the extra page of text it required.
The main characters are bizarrely infatuated with food, but not different food - chicken Marsala and donuts only. And they sexualize it in a way that I think was supposed to be fun and by halfway through the book seems to be just thrown in on every other page as mandatory, as if these people are required to talk about chicken Marsala as if it was a personality trait.
It feels like the author got bored with her own ideas before she even finished. For example, the cover of the book has a pair of sexy shoes. In the book, Cal loves Min’s shoes which are fun and unique, and he buys her a pair. There’s a bunch of discussion about it and then it just stops. By 3/4 of the way through the book, shoes are never mentioned again except In passing. They are not a part of the plot in almost any way, and when it is it’s cliche.
I also hate the writing. Several times I had to stop and reread a passage because there were 5 people talking all at once and the narration describes this so poorly that I couldn’t tell who was saying what to whom.
And finally, one poorly written sex scene thrown in at page 375 of 390 pages because they teased it so much that it was required but completely not worth the extra page of text it required.