A Crazy Kind of Love- Mary Ann Marlowe

I am a massive sucker for celebrity-falls-for-regular-gal books. MASSIVE. If extremist cults and escaping secretive religious groups is my favorite flavor of nonfiction, this is my favorite kind of fiction. Despite not really following any of Hollywood, this is a genre I've always loved (I'm going to go ahead and blame Just a Summer Romance by Ann M. Martin- yes, she of my beloved Babysitters Club- for this. That book was probably one of my first real YA titles as a tween and is fully responsible for my starry-eyed devotion to celebrity-dude-as-love-interest novels). So when I saw A Crazy Kind of Love by Mary Ann Marlowe on the New Fiction shelf, a quick scan of the back cover and I was hooked.

In order to pay the bills and keep her health insurance, fine arts major Jo Wilder has taken a job stalking celebrities as a member of a paparazzi crew. It's not her style at all; she'd much rather snap pics of normal people, doing normal things, but that's not exactly a major source of cash. Problem is, she's not great at what she's been hired to do. Too much heart. Too much seeing celebrities as people and not as product.

A missed photographic encounter with Maggie Gyllenhall leads her straight into the life of Micah Sinclair, the uber-gorgeous frontman of the rock band known as Theater of the Absurd. Micah's a known flirt and major manwhore...but Jo's definitely feeling the attraction too. Sparks burst into flames, and suddenly Jo's in front of all those paparazzi cameras, not just behind them. With her jerk of a boss demanding seriously unethical stuff, Jo's got to figure out what's real, who she can trust...and who trusts her.

God, this was a fun read. Jo and Micah's blossoming romance was both sweet and steamy, and despite his bad boy rep, Micah was an utter charmer. Building off of my last review, though, my favorite part of the novel was the fact that Jo has Type I diabetes. She tests her blood sugar often, experiences a few scary lows, and is often hunting down appropriate food or digging into her stash of snacks, but with the exception of informing Micah of the ins and outs of her condition, it's just part of the story, something Jo lives with, takes care of, and goes about her life. It's her normal, and although she occasionally shows her displeasure with it, it's not treated as A Major Deal, and that's something I really appreciated reading. My father has Type I diabetes, and everything Ms. Marlowe wrote about here, I grew up seeing and hearing about. Jo is never represented as anything other than just a normal person; her best friend and roommate, Zion (whom I absolutely adored) does a good job of caring for and about her without crossing the line into being hovery. There's also the inclusion of a transgender character, which made my heart smile. Representation absolutely matters, and Ms. Marlowe has done a fantastic job. This was truly a fantastic escapist read on a weekend where my pain levels were ridiculous (seriously, how have we gone to the moon and figured out how to transplant hearts and do brain surgery, but the human back and SI joint are still a nebulous mystery???) and I needed that mental getaway.

Peeking around on Goodreads, I see that my library has her other book, Some Kind of Magic, so that's exciting news. And her next novel, Dating By the Book, sounds amazing and comes out in June. I'm going to need to borrow Hermione Granger's time turner here...


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