Customer Reviews

You Again: Showcase (Harlequin Superromance No. 698)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Girl: Jessica Myles, a resident GP who is dedicated to her job because her family is filled with superstar doctors and she's pressured to keep up in the Whiz Kid department. She's intensely shy and still pining over her ex-husband, but in typical WASP fashion emotions are for little people and so she goes home every night to her adopted cat, Cattoo, and reads medical journals.

The Guy: Sam Kirby, an absent-minded genius Nobel-winning scientist who runs a branch of the Human Genome Project (Remember when that was big? Ahhh, these nostalgic 90s reads...). While he's a big, strapping Texan who turns women to goo, he's never gotten over the divorce either and has shunned the girls in favor of work. He's also dedicated to his 1996-era Powerbook and is as obnoxious an Apple fanboy as those you find today. It's a breed that won't die out, unfortunately. They must procreate to keep the Air of Smug Superiority alive. ;-)

The Setup: Jessica and Sam meet by chance at a convention and she runs off like a scalded cat. She also has had hinky feelings about her psychiatrist-colleague, Raye Talbot. Turns out the woman is an imposter, blackmailer and all around sociopath (this is all revealed early on) and decides to take Jessica out by setting her apartment ablaze. Jessica escapes with her cat, but in the leap to the nearby tree, her spirit channels into her cat while her coma-fied body gets carted off to the hospital. So, she's got quite a job ahead of her, because Sam? Not the brightest bulb in the lamp when it comes to seeing what's in front of his face that's not under a microscope.

The Good Stuff: Even though the cat on the cover plainly seems horrified at what's going on behind her, and the expression clearly didn't bode well for what was contained inside, it wasn't a horrible book. The protagonists were very likable, even if Sam was as dumb as a bag of hammers. ("Drink wine given to me by a slinky woman who gives me very strange/weird feelings and whom the cat hates with a spitty, yawly hate? Sure! Guess I got drugged! Look at that, the apartment's filling with smoke. Whoopsie cuddles!")

My Gripes: The first part of the story was real good and it had a mystery with Raye Talbot, but then....the cat-woman soul transference happened, of which there was no hint on the back cover. The moment it happened, I said out loud, "Oh come on! This is getting silly." And it really dragged the story down, because the last 2/3rds of the book was Jessica inside the cat trying to get Sam to see her, and he bumbling around like a boob and talking to her like one would to a cat. The author was probably going for the idea of "what a man says when he thinks nobody's listening," but it went on for far too long. Too much talking at one another and to themselves, with such minimal steps in progress that this Superromance ended up being Superfrustrating.

Also frustrating was, towards the end, when Jessica-Cat has "proof" inside her kitty carrier for Sam to be wary of Raye, it's conveniently neglected so that Raye can show up and wreak her havoc. After going through all the trouble of printing stuff off the computer, I'd have latched my claws into it and dragged it out when Sam took me out of the carrier. Not...forget about it? That was a big, raging plothole that broke my reader axle as the author barged right along towards the conclusion.

And boo to the author for having it seem like Cattoo died after Jessica rejoined her own body until almost the last sentence. Cheap ploy, Ms. Nicholson. Very cheap.

Harlequin Check List:
* Shy, insecure heroine who is post-divorce celibate
* Rugged, catnippy hero who is post-divorce celibate
* Sidekick, this time a cat
* Evil woman (and I mean Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-vil!)
* A humorous premise that might (or might not) work :-P
* So many contrivances to keep the TA-DAH! moment from coming that you wanna rip your freakin' hair out

Jessica always thought that her brilliant charmer of an ex-husband married her on one of his impulses-an it-seemed-like-such-a-great-idea-at-the-time finale to a champagne picnic.
And Sam? Well, he figured Jessica never really loved him. He was her fist man, and as sex itself is such a snazzy little concept...In other words, had Jessica confused all that lovely felling with love?
Seven years ago Jesica and Sam divorced. Now they're together again, and fighting for there lives. But it'll take faith and love to win this particular battle-and one very special cat!

The hero of the story, Sam, is absolutely wonderful - romantic, funny, loyal. Jessica, on the other hand, is so withdrawn and has so many hang-ups that its hard to sympathize with her at times. She is a really nice person inspite of a hard childhood, and she also has her reasons to run from Sam, but at the same time the villainess Raye has a lot more fire than her. Of course, the drawback to spicy Raye is that she's pure evil, but at least she could never be called a coward. "You Again" is still a charmer, especially once Jess becomes a black cat, but Nicholson's "Scent of a Woman" is far better - I ADORE that book! The heroine in that one is just as fantastic as the hero.

A lady gets into an accident and goes into a coma. Her soul migrates into her little cat's body. As a cat, she finds out her ex-husband [who she thinks is a jerk (but secretly still loves)] still loves her. It's a bit hard for her to move around and convince everyone she's still alive when she's only got "paws" in place of fingers and "meows" in place of a human voice. It's pretty cute and funny. Meanwhile, her ex-husband doesn't understand why this strange black cat(which is her inside of a cat body) is following him around!