A review by siria
Fast Women by Jennifer Crusie

3.0

I quite liked this one, as it was frothy and fun but still somehow realistic—Crusie is good at setting up relationships between both the main and the secondary romantic couples which don't rely on external forces to create angst and drama, but rather at showing how repeated patterns of behaviour can ruin relationships without any outside help. I also liked the fact that Crusie is always happy to show her female characters taking genuine pleasure in their food, but not in a neurotic way, and that her heroine is into her forties. There was one thing which niggled at my subconscious, though, and which made my eyebrows rise when I realised what it was: one character with a walk-on part was African-American, and I think in all the Crusies that I've read so far, she's the first character who hasn't been white. Hrm. How much of that is a function of setting (I'm not from the US, but the impression I've gotten is that the Mid-West, where these books are set, is terribly white?), I wonder, and how much is, well, good old white obliviousness?