Casee‘s review of Maybe This Time by Jennifer Cruise.
Andie Miller is ready to move on in life. She wants to marry her fiance and leave behind everything in her past, especially her ex-husband, North Archer. But when Andie tries to gain closure with him, he asks one final favor of her before they go their separate ways forever. A very distant cousin of his has died and left North as the guardian of two orphans who have driven out three nannies already, and things are getting worse. He needs a very special person to take care of the situation and he knows Andie can handle anything…
When Andie meets the two children she quickly realizes things are much worse than she feared. The place is a mess, the children, Carter and Alice, aren’t your average delinquents, and the creepy old house where they live is being run by the worst housekeeper since Mrs. Danvers. What’s worse, Andie’s fiance thinks this is all a plan by North to get Andie back, and he may be right. Andie’s dreams have been haunted by North since she arrived at the old house. And that’s not the only haunting…
I’m not what you would call a standard Jennifer Crusie fan. I’m a late bloomer. It’s only been a short time since I was ambushed introduced to Jenny Crusie. I think that die-hard Crusie fans are going to be cut straight down the middle on this one. Some are going to love this book and some are going to hate it. There is going to be very little in between. There’s a simple reason for that and it can be summed up with one word: ghosts.
It’s possible I’m wrong. I haven’t read all of Crusie’s books, so it could be that there have been ghosts in her previous books. I can take a good ghost, but not when I don’t really expect it. Even then, Crusie writes a damn good book. Funny and entertaining, her characters are good and the story moves along at a clip that will surprise you.
Andie has decided that after ten years of alimony payments from North Archer, it’s time to cut the cord. Only it doesn’t turn out that way and Andie finds herself accepting a job as a nanny of all things. Andie tells herself the offer is just too good to turn down, but she suspects that it’s North that she can’t turn down. Soon she is traveling down to a house that is scary by itself but when she gets inside she is even more disturbed.
Two kids that act like delinquents and a housekeeper that behaves like the house is hers; Andie is able to see that she has her work cut out for her. Right away Andie can tell that the kids aren’t as bad as they have been made out to be. They are scared of something and she is determined to find out what it is. She only has a month in which to do so, but she’s confident that she can help before her month is up. She doesn’t plan on actually caring for the kids.
What happens next really goes beyond anything I expected. When it comes to Jennifer Crusie, I expect eccentricity. I really do. After reading Bet Me, I went on to read Welcome to Temptation. I loved the wacky humor and the characters that were so weird that they could be funny. So I was fully expecting that here. What I got was so much more that it was almost too much. There were ghosts (real ones), possessions (ghostly ones), and ghostly druggings.
So where’s the romance? That’s exactly what I wanted to know as I was reading the book, but I didn’t have time to ask myself that because I was too caught up in the question of “is there really ghosts or is there some explanation as to why a fully sane adult thinks there’s ghosts?” that I didn’t even care. Even at the end of the book, I didn’t care. I was happy with Andie and North’s story. It wasn’t your typical reunion story, but what Jennifer Crusie story is typical?
4 out of 5.
This book is available from St. Martin’s Press. You can buy it here.
Leave a Reply