The Cinderella Deal by Jennifer Crusie

The Cinderella Deal is an older novel of Crusie's that has been reissued. I'd never read it before, but since I am a huge Crusie fan, I picked it up (I think I've read all of hers now). Like all Crusie novels, it's light years better than your average run-of-the-mill contemporary romance. But it doesn't hang together as well as her later ones, so I don't think it's one that I will think about much now that I've put it down.

Daisy Flattery is a former teacher who resigned four years ago to concentrate on her painting. She also makes money as a jewelry maker and professional storyteller. She hasn't become particularly successful (yet), so she's run through all of her savings and is getting really worried about how she is going to make ends meet. Enter her neighbor Linc, a history professor, who needs a fiancée to get his dream job at a small college. He offers to pay Daisy to pose as his fiancée for the weekend. That much is believable, given the way Crusie sets up the characters, though only just. Daisy is a storyteller and she loves to make up stories. The ones that they concoct for the weekend are sort of fun, and they both seem to enjoy the charade a bit. But later, when he comes back to convince her to marry him (still as a charade) and she agrees to do it, it stretches credulity to the limit. But we're still along for the ride, so what the heck.

But once they're married and living in his little college town, Cinderella Deal is just sort of all over the place. The two of them figure out a living arrangement that seems to work pretty well for both of them-- so well that it's a little unbelievable. Linc easily churns out pages of his new book, Daisy gets absorbed in re-decorating the house, and then discovers a new approach to her painting and starts turning out masterpieces. They keep fighting their attraction for each other, though, since they've agreed they will part ways at the end of the school year.

And then there's the vet. Although the main thing Daisy seems to think about is how hot Linc is, there's Art the Vet that she keeps leading on. And since Linc and Daisy are married by this time (and no one knows it's just a sham), the guy is either willing to have an affair with a married woman, or he's looking to break up their marriage, which makes him not very appealing and not very believable as a true foil for Linc. And plus, since she seems to be thinking about Linc all the time, when the vet is on the scene, you think, "Huh? where did he come from?" And then there's the woman that Linc is interested in, but she just sort of disappears about halfway through. And Crusie spends a lot of time describing how Daisy decorates the house, but since it was written more than ten years ago, it doesn't sound creative and interesting, it just sounds dated and strange. (which is of course to be expected in a 12 year old novel, but it doesn't help any.)

But they figure it out, and the conclusion is pretty satisfying. So I'd give this one a B. It's a good, entertaining quick read. Far better than most romance novels, but not nearly up to her usual level.