When it comes to New Age stuff, color me skeptical. I know my astrological sign, but I haven’t read my horoscope in years. Whenever a character in a novel begins to spout the woo woo stuff, my usual reaction is to roll my eyes and curl my lip. However, I really enjoyed Forecast, featuring psychic weather forecaster Rowie Shakespeare, until about half-way though the book when it fell apart.

Rowan (Rowie) Shakespeare’s female ancestors have all been gifted psychics since William’s day. In Rowie’s case, her special ability is to forecast the weather which she can do with total accuracy. Rowie lives with her mother and grandmother in New York where they run a New Age bookstore/shop called Second Site. She is very popular with her neighbors – she is sweet and pretty and her forecasts are always 100% accurate.

Rowie’s prowess doesn’t stay a neighborhood secret, though. The manager of a local television station gets wind of Rowie’s ability and it just so happens that she needs a substitute weather forecaster. Their local weatherman, Drew Henderson, is in a hospital in Florida with a broken leg sustained when he fell through a roof while covering a hurricane. Rowie is a natural in front of the camera and her success is sealed when she is the only one who predicts a small tornado in Manhattan. The ratings for the station soar – and in Florida, Drew gets worried.

When Drew (miraculously cured by a combination of Reiki/Bach therapy/etc.), returns, he falls for Rowie in a major way – and she reciprocates. The station decides to team them up, but just when their personal and professional lives are going well, the station manager fires Drew. The two had once been lovers, and part of her motivation is anger over his new relationship with Rowie. It doesn’t hurt that Rowie’s ratings are better than Drew’s ever were. Hurt and angry, Drew departs.

And the book falls apart. After Drew leaves, the author takes a page from the James Patterson school of writing – lots of short chapters with lots of incidents. Rowie’s grandmother spends time talking to her husband’s ghost. Rowie’s mother flits around mooning over Rowie’s father (whom she met and had sex with once at Beltain, resulting in Rowie…she doesn’t even know his name). One of the customers in the shop has cancer and undergoes a mastectomy. When she falls in love with another customer, they moon around musing about life, death and reincarnation. Then Rowie’s grandmother decides to sell the shop and a parade of cartoony potential buyers troop through, including a couple who are three times bad – they are southern, Baptists, and they eat meat.

Drew finally returns and we have a happy ending, but by then I had been yanked so far out of the story that I was simply glad I’d finally finished the book. When the focus was on Drew and Rowie’s relationship, Forecast was charming and sweet, but when the secondary plots took over, it meandered quite boringly. The book was also preachier than almost any inspirational romance I’ve read and it had a smugness about it that raised my hackles. If only the author could have stayed on course, this would have been a delight. But frankly, I was happy to see it end.