The recap
Minerva Dobbs is an actuary, which means she weighs risk for a living and has no patience for fairy tales. So when she learns that the attractive stranger who approached her in a bar may have done it to win a bet, she runs the numbers. Her sister's wedding is coming, her mother keeps nagging her about dieting, and she needs a date. Cal Morrisey, a charmer with a long record of short relationships, will do nicely, provided she strings him along and then walks away with her dignity intact. Cal, inconveniently, keeps turning up. Jennifer Crusie surrounds the pair with meddling friends, a former boyfriend with an agenda, an uncannily clever cat and a great many doughnuts, which her heroine is allowed to eat without apology. Quick, warm and genuinely funny, the novel is a modern Cinderella story that keeps arguing with its own premise, and a love story about two cautious people learning to stop hedging their bets.
Why read it
For readers who want a smart, fast romantic comedy with a grown-up heroine, a big supporting cast and plenty of sugar, both literal and otherwise.
Fun facts
- 01
Crusie finished a first draft in 1992, but no publisher bit; her editor at St. Martin's Press later agreed to buy it on the condition that she rewrite it, which she did in 2002.
- 02
It won the Romance Writers of America's 2005 RITA Award for Best Contemporary Single Title.
- 03
Crusie came to romance through academia: researching a PhD dissertation on how gender shapes storytelling, she set out to read around 100 romance novels, and the reading pushed her to write her own.
- 04
Kirkus Reviews gave the novel a starred review on its 2004 release.
- 05
BookPage has noted that society's fixation on thinness is a hot-button subject Crusie returns to often, and Bet Me puts a food-loving heroine and her body image at its center.
“Absolutely, irresistibly hilarious.”
