Crazy People: The Crazy For You Stories by Jennifer Crusie

We like Jennifer Crusie in these parts.   We've mentioned it here and here and here.  That probably makes us review reiterators, but we're giving you good stuff.  We can't help it if so much good stuff comes out of the voices in Crusie's head.

Don't ask me to pick
my favorite Crusie voice.

I started reading Crusie when Welcome to Temptation came out.  That was 2000, and I had a new author-crush.  I went back to the bookstore and found two previous publications, Tell Me Lies and Crazy For You.  By then, I was in full-on author-love.  The characters and dialogue were not like anything else I was reading.  I wanted more and more and more.*

* I haven't found an author yet that can write as fast as I devour their work, but at least Crusie shares quality stuff even if I can't get it at the pace I want.  Seriously, instantaneous wouldn't be fast enough. :) On the other hand, Jenny is doing some really interesting things right now, like the Writewell Academy.

Of those first three books I read, I would probably rank them from top to bottom as Welcome to Temptation, Crazy For You, and Tell Me Lies.  (Of course, that's like saying the books are completely freakin' awesome, merely freakin' awesome, and oh-my-goodness good.)  Crazy For You had a hero I wanted for myself and was set in small town that sounded like suspiciously like my own.  (If, of course, I had been cursed with being a Buckeye instead of an Illini.)

Now, Crusie is offering an inside look at how she developed her characters for Crazy For You, predominantly the woman.  This inside look comes in Crazy People: The Crazy For You Stories.  There are six short stories in this collection plus four appendices.  The stories were written as character exercises when she was working on her MFA in Creative Writing at The Ohio State.  Of the short stories, I absolutely loved The Day My Sister Shot the Mailman and Got Away With It, Of Course and Meeting Harold's Father.  Meeting Harold's Father made me melt in a totally irrational sigh.  We can call both of those completely freakin' awesome.  The other four were oh-my-goodness good.  The appendices offer even more insight in the writing and publishing processes because they include a condensed and published version of Just Wanted You To Know, her proposal to St. Martin's Press that included the first chapter of that draft of Crazy For You  and the final, rewritten and published version of the first chapter of Crazy For You.

Small towns have been known to produce this face.

If you like good stories, Crazy People is a great read.  It's funny, and a collection of short stories is great for those times when you need something to pick up and put down.  If you like to know how things are made, or if you have a personal interest in the publishing world, I would recommend Crazy People for you, too.