Strange Bedpersons - Jennifer Crusie

Whenever I pick a Crusie book I know I’ll be laughing out loud. She has great humour and a real knack for funny dialogues.

Tess Newhart knows her ex-boyfriend Nick Jamieson isn't the right guy for her. He's caviar and champagne, she's take-out Chinese pot stickers. He's an uptight Republican lawyer, she was raised in a commune and thinks Cinderella is politically incorrect. He wants to get ahead in business, she just wants . . . him — only not the social-climbing Nick, but the sweet, caring, unbuttoned-down Nick.

And Nick wants her, too, but there's no way Tess is about to play second fiddle to his obsession to make partner. Yet somehow she finds herself agreeing to play his fiancée for a weekend business trip that could make or break Nick's career. And while he's wrapped up in convincing Tess that he needs her in his respectable world, Tess is doing her best to keep her left-wing opinions to herself and her hands off Nick.

This Strange Bedperson is no exception but somehow the characters seemed a bit over the top. The heroine having been brought up in a commune and living in a dangerous part of town in an apartment decorated with thrift store stuff. Somehow she even seemed most over the top than the hero who is suppesedly a yuppie but in which I never saw the faults we usually have on nouveau rich people, ok he was mostly interested in making partner but when he decided to help Tess and her friend he really got things going.

Despite that little flaw (easily explained because this is a 1994 book) the “opposites attract” plot actually works and to add to that Crusie includes a really nice secondary story about Nick’s friend Park and Tess’s friend Gina. I must say I was rooting for them more than for Tess and Nick and the scene of the dinner with Park’s parents is just priceless.
A B.