The issues I had with Lucky in Love were fourfold: the plot, the characters, the writing, and the chemistry. The plot is beyond contrived, I didn’t like or respect the characters, the writing gave me a headache, and as for the chemistry? There was none.

Milli Torres comes to Oklahoma to spend the summer helping out at her grandparents’ ranch, but the last person she expects to run into is Beau Luckadeau. Beau inherited the neighboring ranch from his aunt, and this puts Milli in a bind because what Beau doesn’t know is 1) that she’s the woman he had a drunken one-night stand with 2 years ago, and 2) he’s the father of her baby girl Katy. Milli has no intention of allowing Beau into Katy’s life, and she’s prepared to run if he ever figures out the truth. Good thing for her that Beau is engaged to another woman.

When the story opens, Milli and Beau are at odds because a shared fence between the ranches has been cut. Naturally, each assumes the other cut the fence, despite a lack of any evidence. What follows is six pages of a really bad Western, complete with clichéd metaphors and a shoot-out. Okay, maybe it’s not a “shoot-out” if only one person is shooting, but you get the picture.

Then there’s the backstory. After saving herself for marriage so she could “deserve” to wear a white dress, a sober Milli jumps right into bed with drunken stranger Beau. Beau and Milli don’t use protection because 1) he’s drunk off his ass, and 2) she thinks virgins can’t get pregnant. Really. (Apparently virgins are immune to STDs, too.) It’s all good though, because, even “drunker than a cooter’s owl,” Beau is still an incredible lover. Which I totally wasn’t surprised about, because we all know what fabulous lovers falling-down-drunks make, right? Early the next morning, Milli takes off while Beau’s still passed out in the back of the trailer. Good times.

When Milli discovers she’s pregnant, she doesn’t contact Beau. Why? Well, a variety of half-assed reasons are given throughout the book, but basically it boils down to Milli being an immature, selfish bitch who doesn’t want to share her daughter. Oh yeah, and she believes all men are fickle liars because her ex-fiancé cheated on her. It doesn’t matter that her parents and both sets of grandparents have great marriages. Nope, all men are cheating, lying, bastards because one guy screwed her over.

(Warning: Mild spoiler in this paragraph.) Milli’s immature selfishness rears its ugly head many times throughout the book, most notably when Beau discovers the truth. What does Milli want to do? Run where Beau can never find her or Katy. Why? Because Katy belongs to Milli and she doesn’t want to “share” her. Seriously, that’s her reason. Not because Beau won’t be a great father or anything reasonable like that, but because Milli doesn’t like sharing. She figures Katy won’t ask any questions about her father until she’s 18 — because we all know kids don’t ever ask questions before age 18 — and she’ll deal with having fucked up her daughter’s life then. Way to think about your daughter’s emotional well being there, Mom of the Year.

But let’s not forget Beau. He ain’t exactly a prize himself. Beau is engaged to Amanda — a character who’s so over-the-top-ridiculous she’s farcical. She’s not just catty and mean to some people, some of the time; she’s a raving, lunatic bitch all of the time, even to Beau. That Beau was so deluded for so long when it came to Amanda made me question his grip on reality. That he put up with her being so vicious to him, his friends, his family, and his employees made me lose all respect for him.

Now for the really bad part: the writing. I’m not normally bothered by head-hopping, but perhaps that’s because I have never encountered anything remotely close to the amount of head-hopping seen in this book. Just about every character is given POV — even some random no-name character whose head we jump into for all of two sentences — and it seems like every scene is told from all participants’ perspective. Sometimes the POV switches by paragraph; sometimes it switches by sentence. For that matter, sometimes the POV switches to someone who’s not even in the scene, thereby jolting the reader out of one scene and into another with absolutely no warning. (I wasn’t kidding about the headache.)

Virtually all of the secondary characters — and even Milli and Beau, on occasion — speak in rambling, info-dump monologues, and it’s annoying as hell to read. To make matters worse, there’s no chemistry between Beau and Milli. Zip, zilch, nada, nothing. And to top it all off, the last 40 pages are essentially a really long epilogue. A really long, really boring, epilogue. The conflicts have all been resolved and Milli and Beau are happily planning their wedding around page 250, so I was left wondering why in god’s name the book was 293 pages long.

In case all of the above wasn’t clear: I didn’t like Lucky in Love. Not at all. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that I don’t recommend reading it. Not at all.