Do you remember the scene in Amadeus when the emperor asked the court composer what he thought of Mozart’s new opera and the court composer said “Too many notes”? Well, when I read Terry McLaughlin’s Learning Curve, there were many times when I found myself muttering “Too many words”.

Emily Sullivan seemed to have a career as a perpetual student, but eventually she realizes she has to settle down and discovers her niche – she wants to be a teacher. Emily is a student teacher at Caldwell High School and her mentor is Joe P. “Wiz” Wisniewski. Joe is supposed to be a masterful and inspiring teacher – Emily’s younger brother had him in class and was his worshipful devotee. But lately Joe hasn’t been feeling all that inspired. He’s kind of burnt out, the principal is a jerk, and the old spark just isn’t there. One thing is certain, Joe doesn’t want a student teacher, and he especially doesn’t want Emily.

But rules are rules, and Joe has to be Emily’s mentor. They settle down to an uneasy professional relationship that soon heats up on the personal level. They do their best to keep things cool, but there’s a lot of attraction between them, mostly because they talk and talk and talk and talk about almost everything but social studies (which is what Joe teaches).

Joe and Emily have to face other problems along with their growing attraction for each other. The smarmy principal is a bit too handy around Emily, and several of Joe’s students have adolescent angst. Is teaching really the job for Emily? Can Joe get his teaching mojo back? Can Joe, who lives in Birkenstocks and was raised by an aunt who lives to protest The Man, find true love with Emily – who’s politically in sync with Sean Hannity? And just what does the P. in Joe P. Wisniewski’s name stand for?

It’s been a long time since I had the reading equivalent of highway hypnosis. You know the feeling. You’ve read any number of pages but they don’t register and soon you find yourself at point C but you can’t remember reading point A and B. This was my reaction to Learning Curve. The book went on and on, the characters talked and talked and I took notice only when a particularly juicy bit of purple prose jolted me out of my reading stupor. For instance, “The blinds behind his desk carved daylight into slits, and the dust motes blinked SOS as they floated on their oxygen ocean.”. Or this: “She turned away from him to tug her seat belt across her chest. Right across those dual handfuls of luscious moldable flesh.”, which is the funniest silly euphemism for breasts I have seen in years.

It’s not too often I find myself unengaged in a book with an educational setting. I taught high school, I work in a library that serves teacher education students, and am an adjunct instructor. But this book left me cold. I simply couldn’t picture Joe or Emily and didn’t care about them at all. The wordiness of the book overwhelmed the story and it simply didn’t flow. If you want to read a romance with a school setting I suggest passing on this one and hunting up a copy Jan Freed’s 1998 Superromance The Wallflower.