Bland and annoying

This book is incredibly bland.  As far as I’m aware, this is Bowen’s first novel, and she has greatly improved over time. The writing isn’t bad here, it’s just lacking in much depth.

Willow Reade lives in Vermont because she followed a deadbeat boyfriend there and is now underwater on her mortgage and can’t get out.  She would like to finish her doctorate in child psychology, but can’t figure out how to make that happen based on locality and finances.  Driving home in a snowstorm her truck swerves and runs another vehicle off the road. Dane “Danger” Hollister (and he freaking changed his name to Danger legally!) is an Olympic downhill skier who is training in Vermont so he can be close to his dying brother.  They have an instant connection, have sex in Dane’s jeep and then follow up the next day at Willow’s home.  Dane has rules about not having a girlfriend for Reasons, but Willow ends up pregnant from their encounters.  They have a lot to work out, which they mostly do through physical contact and other people meddling for them, not through their own emotional efforts.

I found both characters dull, and the situation they found themselves in kind of ridiculous and of their own making.  It’s books like this that made me nervous to jump over to contemporaries after reading only historicals.  For some reason the ‘horny strangers caught in a snowstorm who end up raising a baby’ premise (or something equally implausible) just seems far more reasonable in a historical setting.  Willow is languishing in life because of stupid choices that she made, and without making much effort to change things.  THEN, Dane is super careful about using protection, she reassures him she is on the pill, and then when she finds out she is pregnant admits that *maybe* she wasn’t as careful with her pills as she should have been.  Dane is a complete asshole to her, but I can’t blame him at all.  That kind of behavior falls in the ‘unforgivable’ category for me.  Dane and his Reasons could have been resolved long before this book even began.  They just seemed unreasonable and I had trouble giving him sympathy.

I’m really sick of the story line that involves a depressed, antisocial man who is pulled back into life by a sweet woman.  Courtney Milan rocked my world when she flipped it in The Countess Conspiracy, and I’m really struggling to think of another book that does the same.  There are definitely bitchy and ‘difficult’ heroines out there, but I get the sense that authors can’t/won’t make them emotionally inaccessible the way heroes so often are written.  But, I think the most critical thing is that the closed off person better have a good reason for it if an author wants me to care about his or her salvation, and Bowen did not do that here.

Recommendation:  If you are a Bowen completist (I’m not, but it was – and last I checked, still is – free), it won’t pain you to read this one, but if you aren’t, you can totally skip it.  I read the second in this series first, and it is vastly superior.  If you haven’t read Bowen at all, I suggest you start with her Ivy League series instead.