LoveSpell, $5.99, ISBN 0-505-52427-9
Contemporary Romance, 2001
My reaction to this story is more Baby. Oh. Baby. than Baby, Oh Baby!. It has a baby as matchmaker device coupled with a heroine so flaky and giddy and a hero so upright and stuffy that I am hard-pressed to take the story seriously. Some stories have characters that are so well-developed that whatever ridiculous plot device they are mired in becomes readable. Jake Chastaine and Annie Hollister are three cuts short of a full deck when it comes to the character department.
Jake lost his wife recently and he is mad when he realizes that his sperm has been misused by a fertility clinic to impregnate a woman he doesn’t even know. He tracks down Annie to a countryside area in Oklahoma, and it’s love. Really? Jake thinks he can’t love again, not after his wife… oh good, it’s that same baggage again, how delightful. And Annie, who hears her dead grandfather’s voice emanating through billboards – let’s not go there. I’m with the hero on this one: if I were he, I would come to the same conclusion that this woman is one slice short of being a raving lunatic white loaf.
Both of these two never come to life. Yes, the plot is decent, if one has a taste for under-baked humor and kooky situations written after too many tequilas. Annie is meant to be funny and sympathetic in her twit-gone-bananas act of no friends, no life, only babybabybabybabybaby, but I really think she should stop doing whatever she’s doing with her tea leaves.
But more irritating is the way Jake veers from being obsessed with not forgetting his late wife to realizing that hey, that dead broad wasn’t much fun anyway. Excuse me? On behalf of dead women who can’t defend themselves, I feel insulted. Can’t a man love more than once? Annie better watch out – when she dies from sugar overdose and he marries another, she will be relegated to the storehouses of his memory as “that witch who wouldn’t let me paint my den pink”.
The final sitting on the other woman and releasing gas on her face – a dead one to boot! – just to make way for our heroine seals it for me: this book is just average if it has to rely on a mediocre device like this. Let the heroine shine on her own, not at the expense of a fellow sister. I would understand if this book is written by a man bitter over a recent divorce – all woman are money-grubbing bitches who just want your alimony, unlike Annie who just wants babybabybabybaby and will probably starve, alimony-less, as long as she gets the baby, et cetera.
Baby, Oh Baby! isn’t an orgasmic experience. Its flaws also prevents it from being anything to get excited over either.
