I picked up Engaging Men, my first venture into Harlequin’s Red Dress Ink line, with a good deal of anticipation. It was, unfortunately, a struggle to finish, not an awful reading experience, but not a compelling one, either. Ultimately, the word that best describes this book is bland

Angie DiFranco is an actress who’s landed a steady gig (getting little kids to exercise via a small cable program, Rise and Shine) and put her dreams of making it big on hold. Like any other actor, she’s struggling to make ends meet and has a second job, which barely pays the bills. Angie has been dating Kirk for close to two years, but even though she spends most of her time at his place, he resists all her efforts to leave a few articles of clothing, or to otherwise make inroads into his territory. After watching three of her ex-boyfriends get engaged or married, Angie is starting to wonder why anyone hasn’t proposed to her. More to the point, why hasn’t Kirk proposed?

Michelle, the only married friend she has, (who, not incidentally, is the proud possessor of a “diamond the size of New Jersey”), posits the tight lid theory – namely, that men are like jars. One woman has to loosen the lid, and then the next woman can pop it right off. Up until now, Angie realizes, she’s been a lid loosener. But Kirk, she decides, has already had his lid loosened by his ex-girlfriend. It’s time to pop his lid and get him to pop the question.

Kirk is a software designer who’s determined to make it big, and he doesn’t have marriage on his mind. Determined to change his feelings, Angie embarks upon a campaign to get Kirk thinking about the subject, but the closer she gets Kirk to the altar, the more she begins to wonder if she really wants to marry him after all. The more confused she gets, the more she turns to her roommate, Justin, for consolation, and to her best friend Grace, who’s having relationship problems of her own (and who is slated to be the heroine of Curnyn’s next book).

A hunky filmmaker whose first independent film, though acclaimed, didn’t get picked up for distribution, Justin has pretty much given up any effort at a career and he meanders aimlessly from job to job. He’s also so commitment-phobic that his closest and most intimate relationship is with an azalea.

Kirk is something of a stereotype – the workaholic guy who adheres to a budget and tries to make his girlfriend adhere to one, too. He fails to understand the sheer necessity of purchasing a sixty-four dollar pair of jeans that make a woman’s butt look just right, even if her Visa is stretched to its limit. He and Angie clearly don’t have similar goals, but he’s proud of her when it looks like her program is going to be picked up by a network, giving her a steady, dependable income. It’s at this point that Angie really starts to worry: Does she want to do children’s programming for the rest of her life? And what will Kirk say if she decides she doesn’t?

The funniest thing about Engaging Men is the tight lid theory posited on the second page. After that the book isn’t terribly amusing, although Justin’s packrat habits and loving relationship with his azalea did spark a smile or two. Angie’s angst didn’t inspire a lot of sympathy in me, either, just frustration. Angie is a fairly typical indecisive heroine, who can’t figure out what she wants out of life. It takes her most of the book to realize what the reader could see readily enough by page twenty – that she and Kirk have some serious issues to work through before they start talking marriage. The book simply meanders on about marriage when it couldn’t be clearer that the main character really isn’t ready for it. Eventually the reader is reduced to rolling her eyes every time Angie steps into a diamond store, hoping she’ll buy a clue before she convinces Kirk to buy a diamond.

Had the characters been more interesting, the book could have been a winner, but most of them didn’t really work for me. Kirk is deliberately dull. Justin is intriguing, but he doesn’t get nearly enough time “on screen,” so to speak. And the heroine utterly fails to fascinate, a fatal flaw in a Chick Lit book. With characters that didn’t come alive for me, and a repetitive plot that wandered vaguely in circles, Engaging Men simply failed to engage me.