REVIEW: Trust Me On This by Jennifer Crusie

Trust Me On This was found at a resale shop sev­eral years ago. It’s been sit­ting in my TBR pile for just about that long. The price tag of it has sky­rock­eted since it’s been OOP. Sorry that this is not one where you can rush out and get. I know: it’s annoy­ing and it sucks. But accord­ing to Jen­nifer Crusie, Trust Me On This is being reprinted next year.

Trust Me On This is a roman­tic com­edy that actu­ally holds up well con­sid­er­ing that it was pub­lished in 1997. After read­ing it, I had this feel­ing inside that you usu­ally get when­ever you read a really ter­rific story. What do you follow-up with? That is the ques­tion. Another Crusie would make sense since I have a few more of her cat­e­gories to read but con­sid­er­ing that I’ve read quite a few of her books, I feel this one is her best.

Trust Me On This speaks some­what sub­tly about women decid­ing between mar­riage and career. She gives you two women: one in her early thir­ties and one in her early six­ties who’ve made dif­fer­ent choices. Like I said, it is a roman­tic com­edy but at the heart of it, it is about inde­pen­dent women and the choices that they make.

Jour­nal­ist, Dee­nie Banks, who reports on women’s issues, is look­ing to get the inter­view of her career. Her tar­get is Jan­ice Mered­ith, self-proclaimed fem­i­nist and speaker on rela­tion­ships and mar­riage. Dee­nie knows that Jan­ice is in the mid­dle of a divorce, news that hasn’t bro­ken yet and she wants the exclu­sive. So, Dee­nie attends their fourth annual pop­u­lar lit­er­a­ture con­fer­ence where she’s speak­ing, in the hopes of get­ting the interview.

Vic­to­ria Pren­tice is a scholar. She’s been teach­ing for 40 years. She’s tenured, sin­gle and active and is attend­ing the con­ven­tion to meet up with her friends, one of which is Jan­ice Mered­ith. Vic­to­ria has a nephew, Alec Pren­tice, who she also invites to attend the con­fer­ence. Vic­to­ria enjoys her nephew’s com­pany because he makes her feel “alive.”

Round­ing out the cast are Alec Pren­tice, favorite nephew of “Aunt Vic” and his men­tor, Harry Chase. Both men work for the fraud depart­ment in Chicago. Alex decides to attend the lit­er­ary con­fer­ence because their tar­get, Brian Bond, will prob­a­bly attend as well. Bond is a con-man who is into swin­dling col­lege pro­fes­sors with bad real estate deals. So out­side of hear­ing his Aunt Vic speak, this trip is also a sting operation.

Things don’t work out as planned for Dee­nie. First, her tar­get, Jan­ice Mered­ith has labeled her a stalker and has sicced the hotel man­ager on her. Sec­ond, when Alec arrives at the con­fer­ence, he sees her with con-man, Brian Bond and assumes that she’s an accom­plice. There’s some sur­prise twists and turns in between all of that but enough about the plot. How did I like the story?

I’m not eas­ily humored but I laughed quite a bit while read­ing this story. Deenie’s char­ac­ter along with Victoria’s were the strongest and most well defined and the major rea­son why this short story worked so well. There is a sec­ondary romance that devel­ops that I didn’t see com­ing and that, believe it or not, actu­ally worked. I’m not a big fan of sec­ondary romances.

I felt that Alec’s “aw shucks ma’am” with the “big goofy grin on his face” cover he was using was not a smart move. I can under­stand that façade being used to gen­er­ate laughs but still. I was dying to see a more seri­ous side to him when he was with Dee­nie and by the time we do, the story is just about over.

I thought Dee­nie was overzeal­ous in her deter­mi­na­tion to be inde­pen­dent. She’s decided to put men off com­pletely in favor of her career. She stays adamant about that, too. The deci­sion she makes at the end will prob­a­bly dis­ap­point some read­ers but I saw it as a real­is­tic move. No wor­ries tho, since this is a romance.

There were some great scenes and lines in here and I’ll share one with you. In this scene, Alec has enlisted his “Aunt Vic” to help them out on the sting and Harry envi­sions Alec’s 62 year old aunt as a “lit­tle old lady” and then when he finally sees her,

She didn’t look like a lit­tle old lady.
Vic­to­ria fol­lowed his gaze down. “I lift weights. I may not be defeat­ing grav­ity, but I’m giv­ing it a run for it’s money.”

Trust Me On This is a very good roman­tic com­edy but at it’s heart it does speak about the inde­pen­dence of women and hav­ing no regrets and that life is a learn­ing process and a failed mar­riage doesn’t mean women should duck and hide. There was more than a few quotes from Mar­garet Mead in here as well. In the end though, the story’s mes­sage is about mak­ing the best deci­sion for your life, with no regrets. I agree. B+.