Loveswept, $2.79, ISBN 0-553-44188-4
Contemporary Romance, 1992

Charlotte and Robert are in the process of divorcing, and their journey to the dotted line on the papers is a happening one. The latest drama is the man wanting their fancy Cottage by Lake Arrowhead, and Charlotte moves into that cottage because she thinks that this will stop him from claiming it for himself.

Fortunately, these two are not the main characters in Terry Lawrence’s For Lovers Only.

Unfortunately, they are the secondary characters that just refuse to go away.

Charlotte’s mother calls Gwen, Charlotte’s sister, to head over to the cottage to calm the couple. Likewise, Robert’s grandmother calls the man’s brother Dave to head on down to make sure that the divorcing couple won’t do anything stupid—although I think granny is way too late on that one.

Oh, and Gwen and Dave have the hots for one another, and they once shared a kiss that they still remember vividly because it is so, so, so amazing. Gwen is the stereotypical romance heroine that has little sexual interest in men or even a functional hormone system, so this kiss also acts as her trigger to enter a much belated puberty and start having the horny horns for Dave.

Gee, I wonder what will happen to them down at the cottage. There is nothing like idiotic cartoon secondary characters bickering like kids to get the hormones into overdrive, after all!

The best thing I can say about this one is that it is a pretty unremarkable read, so in many ways, it can be a decent launchpad for people to get into the romance genre. The tropes are out in full force, so the new reader will get a pretty good introduction to the stuff that they will come across many, many, many, many, many, many, many times down their future reading of romance stories. So yes, this one is the perfect fix to lead a future junkie down the happy path.

I’m not sure if a hard-boiled romance reader would find much to savor here, on the other hand. The main characters are barely developed—I don’t even recall their last names mentioned here—aside from cursory cosmetic details like their jobs and the heroine’s state of emotional lobotomy prior to meeting the hero.

Their romance is sort of already there due to a kiss in their past, and it is powered by the hero and especially the heroine whining constantly about how they can’t—can’t—ever be, because they didn’t get enough happy hugs in the past.

The heroine is notably irritating in this respect, as she is grasping at straws all the way to nearly the last page to screech that she can’t trust him to love her or never hurt her so eeeeeeeeeeeeeee. She can’t just hop off the pot and end things, of course, because that will be the most sensible thing to do and she doesn’t do sensible; no, she’d just keep getting on my nerves, because why not.

Meanwhile, the bickering morons that started this whole nonsense naturally don’t end up getting divorced because they too are inspired by the power of whining true love to have yet another go at their so-called love. So, in the end, this whole thing is just a plot device to get the hero and the heroine to put out and whine. As these two are annoyingly childish, I wish the author had just used the tried and true done to death plot of a mixed-up reservation causing the hero and the heroine to rent the cottage at the same time.

At the end of the day, Gwen and Dave come off as just slightly more mature than Charlotte and Robert, which isn’t assuring when it comes to how plausible their happily ever after can be. What the heck, maybe they can always go back to that cottage and have a whine orgy or something to sort out their issues.

Me, though, I’m not going to remember much about this thing a few days down the road. Considering how the characters here can be, that is probably a blessing.

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