Pocket, $7.99, ISBN 0-671-04249-1
Contemporary Romance, 2002

Springwater Wedding is what happens when a precocious pre-teen schoolgirl decides to write romance even if she has no idea what falling in love will entail. After watching too many daytime lousy women’s movies Cinemax cable channel, she decides to write a story and rope in all her preteen friends to help with the plot and dialogues.

The result? A story where good heroines weep rivers of tears and nobody speaks and acts remotely like people in real life. Where arguments drag on and on over the smallest and most petty of things – okay, this is probably real life, but I don’t need reading about boring things like this, so I’ll still crap on this aspect – and where the heroines are just so sweet and innocent they probably make chocolate souffles during their toilet bowl sessions.

There are three romances in this story. The first is a reunion of sorts: Maggie McCaffrey comes home after a failed attempt to marry a guy and forget her ex JT Marshall. The guy she marries turns out to be a jerk, et cetera, and now she’s back to pouting and acting petty and perky with JT. There’s a subplot about a murder and some pleasing the parents nonsense (not that those two are related, heh), but this story is basically about two childish people who have never progressed beyond their high school affair. Annoying and so mundane and irritating.

Next, JT’s daddy and his wife are in basically some miscommunication, wrong assumptions, and other “mis” problems that would have been a decent senior citizen romance if those two people will behave like adults. Kathleen, the wife, weeps rivers of tears as she stands there and suffers. The daddy, Reese, sulks and goes surly as he just stands there and gnashes his teeth. Can these two losers do something? Guess not.

Finally, a sad attempt at cyber romance between the town marshal and a sweet, supposedly feisty (pffft) internet pixel that turns out to be the… ta-da! Librarian! I guess the days of heroines being corporate figures and firewomen and policewomen and all are finally over. Anyway, this one is another childish romance that resembles two dumb puppies trying to chase each other’s tails. At least puppies are cute.

And when the whole monotonous peek-a-boo and merry-go-round exercises of juvenile emotional development seems to bore even the author, she quickly wraps the whole story up in a super contrived convenient development that has me going, “Good grief!”

Now, if this book were written by a pre-teen girl with vivid imagination, I’d give it a decent grade, even if the final product resembles a dumb love and compatibility quiz in Cosmopolitan. But no, Linda Lael Miller, a veteran author, wrote this tripe! It must say a lot that even she seems to be so bored by her writing that she administers the super coup d’grace on everybody. The conclusion just blows in how indifferent even the author displays towards the characters.

Springwater Wedding – a temporary zit on the author’s nose that she has to pinch just to move on to her next book? Who knows, but be warned, she’s charging people $7.99 for the ooze that pops out of that giant zit of hers.