Crusie, Jennifer, and Bob Mayer: Wild Ride

Wild Ride is the most recent book from Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer and a departure from their prior collaborations in two ways. First, it’s a fantasy: five Etruscan demons are imprisoned in an amusement park, and they’re getting loose. (Crusie has written at least one other collaborative fantasy before, The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes; Dogs and Goddesses probably is too, but I haven’t read that.) Second, it’s not structured around a romance arc.

The fantasy plot of the book is fine; even using the amusement park as a prison ends up making enough sense that it didn’t bother me. But the characterizations feel unusually flat, which is odd, because it’s not as though Agnes and the Hitman didn’t have just as much plot, and those characters felt very vivid and rounded to me. Also, one of the arcs uses an annoying cliche to speed things along. The net result was that I finished it this morning, thought about it a bit, and realized I had no urge to go back and re-read even the best plot bits. Back to the library it goes tomorrow.

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