She Finally Wakes Up, Then the Fur Starts to Fly

Quinn McKenzie’s life is pretty good. She has a good job, a good man, good friends, and she’s from a family that seems to be functional.

Fortunately, it doesn’t take many pages into Jennifer Crusie’s “Crazy for You” (St. Martin’s Press) to see that Quinn’s boss is from hell, her man is from Mars (and a stalker), her friends are unraveling (and from Venus), and her mother, father and sister are one enchilada short of a combo plate.

In summary, Quinn’s life stinks.

Quinn is a bit more charitable. She describes her life as “beige.” We all know a Quinn. She’s the reliable, dependable person in your life who will retire after 40 years on the same job. She has the same phone number she had when she first got a phone; she’s even listed. She rarely complains, and when she does, you have to listen closely because her gripes don’t sound like normal gripes: There’s no great outrage. She keeps all promises--when she says she’ll meet you at the movies on July 23, 2004, at 8 p.m., you know she’ll be there.

When the world is crashing around you, she’s the one you look to to hum “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” Quinns don’t sing it, they just hum. They’re reliable (and not annoying) that way.

“Crazy for You” is the story about what happens when Quinn McKenzie decides not to be a rock anymore. Yeah, yeah, we get to witness her personal growth and introspection blah, blah, blah. But the chain reaction is what makes this book a delight. Even the most minor character is affected by Quinn’s decision to make her life more colorful--and all because of a rat-dog named Katie.

Katie is a stray who wanders into Quinn’s life and, of course, is a metaphor for Quinn’s life. Quinn has been having a comfortable collie life. Now, she needs a stray rat-dog life. Quinn takes to Katie immediately, but her live-in boyfriend, Bill, doesn’t. Let’s just say Bill wouldn’t go into mourning if Katie were to meet, say, the right front wheel of a moving bus. But even Bill isn’t a dog killer, at least not directly. So he hauls the dog off to the pound--unbeknownst to Quinn--and sets plans in motion for the pound to do the dirty work.

When your man kidnaps your dog and takes it to the pound without your consent, well, it makes you do some hard thinking. Should this man be the one you spend the rest of your life with? Should he be the father of your future children? Definitely not, Quinn decides. What follows is a delightful romantic romp complete with happy ending. It is reminiscent of Beach Reading Queen Susan Isaacs in the early days before she started competing with Tom Clancy for the Biggest Book award. It’s one thing to write page after page about the battle for world domination, but a romance novel should not go on and on and bloody on.

“Crazy for You” is a short (yes, even at 325 pages), sweet book filled with characters who are just plain hoots, including Quinn’s ESPN-dependent father, Joe; Quinn’s appropriately named friend Darla, who does hair at the Upper Cut; and Quinn’s new hunka-hunka hunk of a boyfriend, Nick, who, it should perhaps be mentioned here, used to be married to Quinn’s sister, Zoe, who is now happily married to Ben.

With beach season soon upon us, I’m now going to root around for Crusie’s other novel, “Tell Me Lies.” She’s certainly a legitimate heir to the Beach Reading Throne.

Michelle Williams can be reached at michelle.williams@latimes.com.

For more reviews, read Book Review

* Sunday: Adam Hochschild on “Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross”; Barbara Ehrenreich on World War I; and Michael Frank on Pat Barker’s “Another World.”