In the past few months I have read many, many books and let me just say that this one is definitely one of the best that I have read in a long time. It was absolutely charming and engaging, *hysterically* funny, had fantastic primary and secondary characters, an interesting plot, witty dialogue, and on and on and on.

There are almost always things - even in an absolute-5-star-favorite book - that I would want to change if given the option, even if it's very small. Here, the ONLY thing I would want to change would be in the epilogue where it says that Cal and Min don't have kids ... in my mind, they do, the epilogue just hasn't got that far yet time-wise.

BOTTOM LINE
WONDERFUL!!! READ IT!!! ( )

Enjoyed reading it like I did with "Faking It" and it has a lot of tension going on. I loved the miscommunication, witty dialogue, and the longest foreplay in history. Not much sex scenes but a lot of sizzling makeout parts. It would always make you wonder what happens next with the unpredictable characters, and charming supporting characters on the side. Speaking of which, are very likable but not very alike. JC makes it a point to add a pet to her novels I think I already read 3 that has, this time it's a cat. Very entertaining and sexy, I'd read it again! I love JC! ( )

awesome love scenes but it took me a little bit to get into. I initially wanted to beat the crap out of everyone in the book. The hero was the first to grow on me and I ended up liking the heroine but somewhat reluctantly. ( )

I'm a big chic-lit fan, but this book just didn't cut it. I felt like it was drawn out and the plot wasn't developed enough. ( )

I don't really consume 'romance' books as a regular part of my book diet, but we all need something sweet every now and again, right? I read this book in one sitting, staying up until 3AM to finish, so that definitely says something about it. I think it is a well written, modern romance and the witty repartee is excellent. As a 'healthy' girl myself, I enjoyed the thought of a man romancing a woman with food, especially chocolate-iced doughnuts (which are a particular weakness of mine). I *bet* you will enjoy it to. ( )

This is in my top 3 of all books I have ever read. You will laugh, cry, smile, and jump up and down. Best buy...get it! ( )

Min is the Crusie heroine I identify most with. I like how she and Cal complement each other and especially enjoyed the parts where they stand up to each other's parents. I also just really like the way Crusie lets her characters be themselves in this one. ( )

And here I thought I'd read all of he books! Apparently not (or I completely forgot. Also possible). This one was both cute and gimmicky, but I thought the conflict rathwer weak. Who cares, it's still full of Crusie wit and humour. And at least it wasn't depressing. A lovely read. And it made me hungry! ( )

I'm not really big on romance novels, but I make an exception when it comes to Jennifer Crusie. I always have fun reading her books. This is a personal favorite because it features a less-than-perfect character that *gasp* has issues with her weight. Yet she is portrayed as smart, attractive, and sassy as hell. She's not the third wheel by no means, and she has great taste in shoes. She's an absolute pistol, and I love Min. I love everything she stands for. ( )

Love the non-traditional female protagonist and the male protagonist who appreciates her!! Refreshing! ( )

A guy walks into a bar. He meets his friends there, one of whom picks an okay-looking girl and bets him $10,000 that he will sleep with her within a month. He instead bets his friend $10 that he will take her out to dinner. Two things are of note here: (1) The friend making the bet just finished breaking up with this girl, and (2) the girl happens to overhear most of it, and is now under the impression that her ex-boyfriend bet a guy $10 that he would sleep with her in a month. The guy accepting the bet, the ever-popular serial dater Cal Morrissey, accepts the bet for dinner and $10 with the girl, Min Dobbs. Min's ex-boyfriend, David, is too drunk to realize that Cal accepted the $10 bet, and not the $10,000 bet. Min decides to go out with Cal in order to spite David. Plot to one of the archived comic relief episodes of Beverly Hills, 90210? Not hardly, and I must sheepishly admit that 90210 was one of my favorites in its heyday. Instead, this is the catalyst event for Jennifer Crusie's book, Bet Me, a novel I picked up with cynical expectations in my exploration of the "chick lit" genre. I have to say that I was not surprised to see that the characters (aside from, to a certain extent, Min and Cal) are generally one-sided and the plot itself was quite predictable (what else would they do but end up in each other's arms, right?). Still, the writing was very funny, and at the least it was an entertaining read if you are able to dismiss these shortcomings. Regarding these cookie cutter characters, it is almost easy enough to put the large majority of them into categories. Min has her girlfriends - one is the popular, svelte one who gets all the guys and is more than a little suspicious of men, and the other is the sweet, soft-spoken one who believes in fairy tales. Cal's friends are similar foils: One is the tough guy who appears to be monomaniacal when it comes to certain pick-up lines, and the other is a sort of shy and simple guy with old-fashioned values. Cal and Min at first present themselves too to fit right in. Cal is the popular hunk with a habit for dumping women, and Min is the angry woman who is upset over her breakup not because David left her, but because he left her without a date for her sister's wedding. A somewhat refreshing twist from this formula is the eventually over-emphasized subplot dealing with Min's weight, which is a subject of constant debate and complaint from her overbearing mother. (Yet another typical character... Heck, even the phrase "overbearing mother" is a cliche, yeah?) It was nice to take a break from the whole I-hate-you, I-love-you plotline to hear about Min's concerns about her weight and the tension it causes with the women of the Dobbs household. Aside from this twist, the subplots in the story act mostly as a way of presenting the rest of this ensemble cast in its typical fashion: Naturally, Cal and Min's friends attempt to hook up accordingly. Naturally, Cal and Min's exes act as interlopers. At times it felt like the subplots were fillers to space out the Cal and Min story, which would have been very typical if it weren't for the supporting actors of chicken marsala and Krispy Kreme donuts. The stars of the subplots were, possibly because of their one-dimensional nature, only somewhat likable, and only at certain moments. To be honest, some of the subplots were annoying, others ridiculous. Still, after all this, I have to say that the book did make me laugh out loud. The stories are set up for some entertaining, and even mildly believable comic moments. Once the main characters gain familiarity with the reader, it is easy to enjoy their expected reactions when faced with certain predicaments. I feel that more could have been done with this... More could have been done with EVERYTHING, but the comic potential is the only aspect that really made it through to near completion. Borrow it from the library if you're in the mood for a laugh on the beach. ( )

Honestly, I found this book to be quite enjoyable. Again, my initial complaint wasn't with Crusie's writing style or her voice, but with plot development (or the lack there of). In Bet Me, she has, oh almost 200 more pages to work with, so needless to say the plot and love story are much more well-developed.

Our heroine is 33-year-old Minerva Dobbs--aka Min--a chubby, sweet, intelligent actuary who dresses a little dowdy but who has interesting taste in shoes. The hero? Tall, dark and handsome Calvin Morrisey who has a habit of making women love him--and then leaving them.

When Min's boyfriend breaks up with her three weeks before her sister's wedding, she's understandably a little ticked off. Okay, she's more than just a little ticked off, considering the main reason he broke up with her was because she wouldn't put out. The icing on the cake, however, is an overheard wager between her ex (David) and the hunky, risk-taking Cal--$10,000 that Cal can't get Min in bed within a month. When Cal approaches Min and asks her to dinner, she accepts, all with the purpose of stringing him along and making him lose the bet. Unfortunately, though, a little voice inside her head keeps whispering, "this one," and he keeps kissing her and feeding her Krispy Kreme donuts and brings her a cat and introduces her to a great Italian restaurant named Emilios and keeps kissing her... You get the point. She's hooked, even though she doesn't want to be.

Cal has no interest in winning the bet, considering he never agreed to it the first place. But something about Min intrigues him. Maybe it's her voluptuous body. Maybe it's her wit and intelligence. Maybe it's her shoes. Or maybe it's the look she gets on her face every time he puts a piece of chocolate-glazed donut in her mouth. Something about Min attracts him, and he can't stay away. Granted, it doesn't help that his brain keeps whispering, "this one" to him while he's kissing her, either.

Bet Me is a classic tale of opposites attracting, only to find that they have more in common than they realize. The story itself is well-written, funny (in fact, downright hilarious at times), smart and extremely enjoyable. I read the first 3/4 of it within a few hours, which is definitely saying something considering how little time I have to devote to reading these days (plus, it's a testament to just how fast Crusie's writing reads). The romance progressed nicely between Min and Cal, and I thought that framing it against Cal's ex-girlfriend's relationship theories was a fantastic idea. In fact, I even found myself slightly sympathetic to Cal's psychologist, theory-laden girlfriend Cynthie--while she came across as a bit of a man-eater, she really did love Cal and simply had her priorities a little screwed up. David, however, needed to be kicked in the knee.

The book is also full of a great cast of secondary characters, with their own romances to complement Min and Cal's, not to mention adding depth to both main characters. Reading their stories made me feel like these people could be my friends, too (hell, they reminded me of a lot of my friends, to be honest), and I was rooting for them all the way.

Despite being a romantic comedy, Crusie does present some more serious issues that the characters have to deal with. First, obviously, is Min's weight. While Crusie never comes out and says just how big Min is, I somehow got the impression that she was around a size 14, maybe 12, which is right there on the borderline between straight sizes and plus sizes. Cal thinks Min is beautiful just the way she is, but Min has a different opinion, largely thanks to her mother who's obsessed with staying thin and avoiding carbs. Her mother comes across as being pretty verbally and emotionally abusive at times, and it's really no wonder that Min (and even her sister Diana, to an extent) has body image issues.

Cal has his own set of serious issues to deal with. He's dealt with dyslexia his entire life, and as a result was constantly berated by his father and his peers and called "stupid." When he declined his father's invitation to join the family firm and instead started his own business with his two best friends, that only helped to stir up more resentment between father and son. Throw in a chilly mother and a brother who's following in their father's footsteps, and Cal has his own self esteem issues to deal with.

Granted, Crusie doesn't dive completely to the depths of these things, but she definitely does more than skim the surface. I love it when a romantic comedy does something like this--gives a character a serious issue, makes them deal with it, but does so in a way that isn't preachy or After School Special-ish. As a result, Min and Cal were very well-rounded characters who both grew and became better than they were at the beginning of the book.

There were only two things that remotely bothered me, but they were so small that they didn't take away from my enjoyment of it as a whole. The first is a nitpicky thing, but I found it hard to believe that Cal noticed Min's shoes as much as he did. Sure, she wore some odd shoes, but most straight men I know could care less about women's shoes unless they're coming off the woman along with the rest of her clothes. I also wish Crusie would have continued the recurring bets that she started with in the beginning. Min and Cal kept betting each other ten bucks on different things. Min kept winning. But somewhere about a third of the way through, the bet thing got dropped. I really would have liked to have seen Crusie continue that thread, as it was fun but also illustrated perfectly their different personality traits.

Overall, the book read very fast and was quite enjoyable to read. I laughed out loud on several occasions, and loved the fact that it was so unabashadly fairy-tale romantic. And of course, we all know I loved reading about a not-skinny heroine.

I would definitely recommend this book, and I have a feeling I'll end up picking up at least one or two more of Crusie's books to read in the future (anyone have any suggestions?). ( )

Fun. It's a "sex in the city" storyline with an insecure woman meeting a very handsome man who also has some secret insecurities. Some guys make a bet at a bar that the handsome guy can't get the uptight girl into bed in a month. She overhears the bet and decides to play a game of her own. ( )

http://imaromancereader.blogspot.com/... ( )

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The plot only makes sense if you squint at it from a distance through fogged-up glasses; eating that much chicken marsala that frequently would make me very ill; and I think a good editor would have drawn a line of red pen through the epilogue, but Bet Me is still great, frothy fun. Very funny in parts, with plenty of characters who pop off the page. The secondary characters were drawn much more finely than they were in Crazy for You, the only other Crusie I've read, though the parents did still feel rather cardboard cut-out. I grew very fond of the two main characters, Min and Cal, however, and though neither of them grew terribly much throughout, they did feel real and they had great chemistry together. A deliciously mindless read. ( )

This is probably my favorite Cruise. As always with her books, the characters are so real they pop off the page. I don't know how Cruise managers to take stale characters (the grasping society mother, the bombshell friend, the bitchy ex-girlfriend.) and make them real people who you can (almost) sympathize with. I think it's all in the details, and this book has a lot of them.

The plot plays second fiddle to the characters, but there's still the usual Cruise climax, a jumble of people and confusion that somehow works out in the end. I know some people don't like the epilog, but I love that feeling of completion from knowing how everything works out. ( )

I used to think I hated romance novels, but this one doesn't quite fit the genre. It is funny and charming and the female character is refreshing. She's not the stereotypical bombshell. She's a real woman, with real curves who eats carbs! That's right, CARBS. And who doesn't like a happy ending once in a while? ( )

Not one of my favs of hers, but still packed with humor. ( )

Tooooo long and dragged out! ( )

A young woman out with friends overhears a handsome stranger betting his friends that he can get her into bed. She has no intention of going to bed with him, but she does need a date for an upcoming wedding, so she lets him take her out to dinner. Light and funny.

A sexy plumpish gal meets a hunky guy. There are some ups & downs but true love triumphs. She has horrible parents. There is some todo about a bet she thinks he made to have sex with her. There are devious bad-hearted exes who conspire against our heroes. There is a nice cat.

Minerva Dobbs has just been ditched by her boyfriend. She finds herself part of a bet, a bet she has problems letting go because she fancies the guy involved. Calvin Morrisey is hot, but he really doesn't want commitment. As he slowly discovers that he likes her, she keeps trying to resist.

It's lighthearted fun and Crusie really does have a deft touch with her comedy and her romance. I enjoyed the main characters and some of the secondary characters are great fun as well. ( )

This is my favorite Romance of all time!
I have had everyman and woman I know read this book and they loved it! ( )

If you were being pursued by a man (the kind of which never chases slightly overweight actuaries), and you knew it was only because he’d made a bet with your ex…would you touch him with a 39 1/2 foot pole? Neither would Minerva “Min” Dobbs. At least not until Cal Morrissey starts to entice her with delicious foods and even more delectable kisses.

Min lives her life by statistics, and the odds of a man like Cal actually being interested in her for herself are slim to none. But circumstances and coincidences (fate?) keep putting them together. Cal is a player, or so everyone thinks, and isn’t interested in a serious relationship - until he gets a look at Min’s zany shoe collection.

This is a fabulous book - my first Crusie, and I hope they rest are as good - one of the few times I’ve been tempted to turn the book over and start again immediately. I love the way the entire cast of characters interacted: Min’s two best friends, her bride-to-be sister and bridesmaids, her weight obsessed “no carbs, no butter” mother, the ex-boyfriend, Cal’s two friends, his sugar-induced vomiting nephew, his chicken marsala-making restaurant-owning friend, the ex-girlfriend, and the snobby parents - they make for one hysterical ride. The side stories and subplots create a rich story and a ton of laughs. You can’t help but love it!