Three Days as the Crow Flies Book

So to begin I have to say that I fell into the same trap as many others did in that I read "Bet Me" first, my first ever Crusie book actually and adored it. I practically sprinted to the library and got every Crusie book they had and schlepped the entire armful out to the car with barely contained glee. Glee I tell you.

My next read was "Agnes and the Hitman" which was cute and occasionally funny but whereas I loved "Bet Me" I only liked "Agnes." Undaunted, though, because "Agnes" is a collaboration with another author and I thought that might have been the reason Crusie's charm was so toned down, I picked up "Temptation" off the teetering stack and started to read.

I was kind of interested in the con man aspect but it didn't appear often enough in my opinion. I also thought the main love interest was a really self important jerk, solidified by the fact that he has a daughter whom he barely spends time with. At nearly 40 years old he LIVES WITH HIS MOTHER. Yeah you read that right. This supposed epitome of sexiness and charm lives with his mom who he lets raise his daughter because apparently he's too busy downing beers at the local tavern and chasing women to raise her himself.

Then we have Sophie who's in town to shoot an audition tape with her, what?, ex sister in law? It's never really clear. But it's the B movie actress who dumped her brother some time back so why on Earth Sophie and her sister would bother with helping Clea do anything at all other than sleep with the fishes is beyond me.

But they follow Clea into Temptation, Ohio, home of the world's largest phallic symbol water tower, it's even painted peach, and are so mesmerized by the giant penis that they crash into some of Temptation's more illustrious citizens. Which results in the arrogant mayor and the townie cop going to their farmhouse to interview them.

And here's a part that's weird because we're not sure how much Clea is paying Sophie and Amy to make this movie, if she's paying them anything at all, but suddenly in addition to shooting they all decide to paint and wallpaper Clea's farmhouse that she's going to sell.

That didn't make a damn bit of sense to me. I'm as helpful as the next person, I swear, but unless I'm getting paid, I'm not lifting a finger to help out my ex-sister in law who dumped my brother. I'm just not that good of a person. But I think that's just supposed to be an illustration of Sophie's martyr complex, that she takes care of everyone around her but no one takes care of her. You can easily see that this is just a plot device to make Sophie fall in love with the farmhouse.

One night Sophie, Amy, and the ex-sis head to the local tavern where Sophie gets blitzed and the male lead goes down on her. Then when she sobers up and remembers that, oh yeah, she left a boyfriend in Cincinatti, Phin (dumbest name ever) says, "Oh hey, baby. No problem. Oral sex isn't sex anyway. Chillax."

And is that what you want to hear from your male lead? Really? Oral sex isn't sex? Because this is a romance. And romance by definition have a HEA. So do I want my heroine to end up with a guy who's gonna get blown by a hot chick while shopping for tools at the Home Depot and come home to tell Sophie, "It's not a big deal. Oral doesn't count, hon." No, I do not.

Phin seems to be shockingly lax in the morals department, not raising his daughter, seducing drunk women and then walking away saying it's not even sex. Which is fine if you're writing a rake/womanizer type character who at some point sees the error of his ways. But Phin never does. So you know he's going to get the BJ sometime in the future and Sophie's going to lose her mind about it.

It's kind of a whole cast of crappy characters. The only nice person in the whole novel seems to be the cop. More than half the people are semi-cheating on everyone else, in public, just to get back at their significant other. Sophie's sister is leaving her high and dry to go to L.A. and it will kill their video business when she goes, leaving Sophie flat broke. But Amy doesn't care where that leaves Sophie. Parents are busy manipulating their children into unwanted relationships like their kids are their own personal chess pawns. "Honey I know Phin's running all over town having sex in public with that movie skank, but he needs a son and you need to settle down at the ripe old age of 20 so of course you'll still be marrying him when he gets the skank out of his system." Are you kidding me? There aren't a lot of characters to like here.

Meanwhile, back in Temptation, Sophie takes Phin home to have sex and ends up having to break up with her boyfriend's answering machine because he won't pick up the phone to let her dump him properly. Once that pesky task is done Phin's all for the 'cheap sex' as he calls it. But he should have called it 'boring sex', because it was. No really. That's not just me talking. They have to stop going at it because in the middle Sophie was so bored she was counting the cracks in the ceiling tiles and even Phin, who'd hump a granny's leg, thought that was just a little too awkward.

Speaking of awkward, they wait til Sophie's sister Amy comes back from the bar and Phin pins down Sophie and starts doing her while simultaneously throwing around lamps in order to get Amy to walk in on them having sex.

And here's where it totally collapsed for me. Because this guy is the MAYOR and a FATHER, and THIRTY SIX YEARS OLD and he really shouldn't be acting like a drunk frat boy through the whole novel. But then again he lives with his mommy, so maybe he's acting out.

Here's the thing. I like kinky sex as much as the next girl. More than the next girl. You'll just have to trust me on this. But it's jarring when it's a grown father who's acting a fool in his very, very small town. What's going to happen when his 9 year old daughter is told by other kids at school "I saw your daddy having sex with some skank"? You can't keep your exhibitionist tendencies under wraps for the sake of your kid?

A lot of the dialogue is movie quotes, which seem cute at first, but then you realize this is a substitute for REAL dialogue and it becomes annoying. There are far too many movie references in general especially since I have seen some of them and the point the author is trying to make by drawing parallels to these movies is lost on me. I don't want to have to watch a dozen movies to understand the book I'm reading. This happened in "Agnes", too, the male lead sometimes referencing classic movies, but it wasn't quite as pervasive in that book.

Also, the plot itself is pretty damn stupid because, look, I'm all for women being empowered at any age and "I am woman, hear me roar" and all that, but the reality is NO ONE wants to see a fifty year old porn star. NO ONE. And the plot is mostly about a fifty year old ex porn star trying to make soft core porn for a comeback and her old hardcore porn producer is trying to get her to scrap the soft porn and come to the dark side for one last romp. Again, NO producer is going to make a deal with a fifty year old to do porn.

Anyway, I skimmed a little after the halfway point and by that time I had to sit up and say to myself, "Self, you know you can't finish this book." So I put the book down and now it's one of my few Did-Not-Finish reads. I know how it ends because I skimmed the last two chapters but, yeah, there's that large chunk toward the end that I didn't bother to read.

I have in my hands "Getting rid of Bradley" also by Crusie and since her novels have gone from Great to Good to Did-Not-Finish this is her fourth and final chance. I still have a stack of her books on my shelf that I got from the library, but I'm pretty sure I read the best two she'll ever write ("Bet Me" and "Agnes"). Wish me luck!