Let’s Pretend This Will Work has a maddening heroine. That can be a good thing and even a very entertaining one – at times she reminded me of Charity Hope Valentine from Sweet Charity. But…

New Yorker and teacher Mimi Perkins is looking for love, and she’s not afraid to use a psychic to do it. When La Starla predicts Mimi will have good news soon, Mimi meets divorced fellow teacher Ren Yardley, who lights her fire, is into everything she is into, is great in the sack, and loves his adult daughters Jenna and Parker, and soon comes to love Mimi. He proposes to her and she ecstatically says yes.

Unfortunately for Mimi, Ren’s ex-wife, Judith, is involved in a car accident and is severely debilitated both physically and cognitively. He moves back in to the family home to care for his daughters. With Ren in Connecticut, Mimi soon starts feeling like the other woman, whom Ren only sneaks off to have sex with.

Losing her job and apartment in rapid succession, Mimi moves to New Haven at Ren’s suggestion. But she feels like she’s barging into the Yardley’s lives in the hope of moving everything toward marriage more quickly. Soon, she soon begins to wonder if Ren belongs with his family and not her.

Mimi’s apartment is above a parent-run daycare center (this book is set in the early 1980s, which… I suppose makes this plot twist more believable?) She gets a job at the center and meets a widower named Jamie, father of her favorite charge, little Alice, who begins to make her wonder what she really wants out of life.

Let’s Pretend This Will Work is such a classic mixed bag of fantastic and ludicrous, annoying and sweet, genuinely moving and goofily bathetic. This may be the most classic C-grade I will ever give, because I liked it and disliked it in equal parts.

It’s easy enough to feel pity for everyone here. Ren is stuck in an impossible situation, and it’s both hard and easy to sympathize with him. But Mimi is willfully blind and almost maniacally perky sometimes. She behaves in a pretty monstrously pushy way during a really tough time for him and it made me dislike her and the manic pixie instant family situation beckoning from the other direction. Ren is selfish, sure, but then Mimi is pushing at him to marry her while he’s taking care of an aphasic woman who might drown in her sleep. Mimi’s a people-pleaser but, to be honest, not where it counts.

I did like Jamie and Alice and the families at the daycare – even though I was kind of boggling at this basically unlicensed community daycare center being run on what’s generally good vibes and the demerit system – I found myself quietly counting fire code violations as I read. I suppose that’s why Dawson set this in the early 1980s – fewer regulations. The ending is also too saccharine to be believed and has a ridiculous, nonsensical twist.

And yet Let’s Pretend This Will Work manages to pack in some charm, and for all the things I didn’t like about this story there was something I liked. Caveat lector, readers, about this one.