Hometown Girl poses a question to the reader: Be ye an oil man, or be ye a tree hugger? How you answer may influence your evaluation of Hometown Girl, a book that takes on a controversial environmental issue, then offers a silly resolution to this serious and topical conflict.

Ah, conflict. Every story’s gotta have it. There are two kinds: internal and external. Internal conflicts are issues characters must face based on what’s going on in their heads (such as abandonment issues or fear of tuna sandwiches). External conflicts are problems characters must overcome in the physical world (such as the mortgage is due tomorrow or evil tunas are trying to take over the universe). Got it? (There will be a quiz later.)

Okay, so, you don’t got you no conflicts, you don’t got you no story. However, as with everything, there are rules to conflict. It cannot, must not be manufactured or based on a defective premise simply to keep the momentum of the story going. If it is, nothing that follows makes any sense and savvy readers finish the book (if they do) unsatisfied. Furthermore, the conflict must be something our hero and heroine can actually confront, take on, and solve realistically.

In Hometown Girl, we have several conflicts, all based on faulty premises. This got me off on the wrong foot right away. Had this been “my” book and not a review copy, I wouldn’t have finished it.

Lauren Van Horn has returned home at the request of her sister, Becca, who is involved in a nasty divorce and child custody case. Lauren is from the small Utah town of San Rafael, but she left awhile back since she’s an environmental lawyer whose views were controversial and unpopular: San Rafael has oil and many of the locals want to exploit it.

Gabe Randolph dated Becca years ago. He’s now a wealthy oil producer (local boy makes good) who hopes to drill in the fragile Red Rock desert near San Rafael. Gabe sees oil drilling as an opportunity to give the nearly destitute little town some economic recovery. Lauren feels that the land and the people would be better served if Red Rock were turned into a protected wilderness area for everyone to use. (While this is good external conflict, the resolution was hardly realistic and didn’t live up to the severity of the issue at hand.)

The foundation of the romance between Gabe and Lauren is this: Becca asks Lauren and Gabe to pose as lovers to deflect attention from Becca’s now platonic friendship with Gabe so Becca’s ex-husband Joe won’t win custody of their child. Joe has been hassling Becca because of Gabe’s return to town and she thinks to throw him off the track by having Gabe appear to have affair with her sister. What, Becca never heard the term “restraining order”? She thinks a fake romance between her sister and her former boyfriend will keep Joe away? And Lauren agrees to do it even though the thinks Becca is still in love with Gabe? No. No, no, no. How lame is that?

Lauren’s been crazy for Gabe since she was 15 and he was dating Becca. So she agrees to kiss him in public and pretend to be lovers with him to throw off the apparently dumb as a (Red) Rock Joe. This premise is so contrived it’s not even funny and biased me against the book right from the get go. As the reader knows will happen, Lauren and Gabe’s romance turns real while the oil drilling vs. the environment issue plays out (badly) in the background.

What’s frustrating about Hometown Girl is that the actual writing and dialogue is mostly good, even very good in some places, and a couple of the secondary characters are sweet. But the basic plot, yikes. This book could have been so much better. I will say that Gabe makes an engaging hero. He’s charming and has a great sense of humor. I really liked him a lot. Lauren didn’t charm me in the least, especially at the beginning. Even considering the nifty Gabe, there was too little else about the book that captured and maintained my interest.

Hometown Girl had potential, but I’m afraid it went to waste.