Like many these days, I have been longing to escape into a good, light-hearted, fun book, and the romantic comedy Mad About Maddie looked like just the ticket. Unfortunately, the combination of cardboard characters, un-funny situations, and awkward writing left me feeling frustrated instead of refreshed.

Maddie Copeland gets more than she bargained for when she befriends an old man who is a summer visitor to the seaside town where she lives. When he dies, she finds that he has left her his entire fortune – with a few strings attached. One of the strings is his grandson Hank. In order to remain CEO of the family corporation, workaholic Hank has to take six weeks completely off, and spend them in bucolic Hanscomb Harbor. Guess who is in charge of overseeing the conditions of Hank’s vacation? Maddie, of course. And did I mention that the grandfather has an unfortunate history of romances with gold-diggers? So Hank comes to town prepared to hate Maddie on sight, and figure out a way to buy her off as soon as possible.

While there are ingredients for a successful romantic comedy present, they never gelled for me. Hank and Maddie never felt like real people. Part of the problem came from the manipulations of the plot. It yanks them here and there, grinds utterly to a halt for pages and pages of introspection, and then lurches forward with some un-funny slapstick (for example, Maddie, who lives in a beach resort, can’t seem to walk on sand and falls down. Ha. Ha.) In fact, everything from the main characters to the supporting cast (especially Maddie’s older friend and co-worker who is supposed to be zany but is merely obnoxious) to the ultra-cute town itself seems like set dressing for a play that never really gets underway.

Every time the story seems to have settled on a direction and begins to generate some action, the author derails it. For example, the will causes a crisis when it appears that Maddie will have to chair the big annual meeting of the corporation, and the story of the will gets into the press and causes nervousness among the shareholders. We see Maddie and Hank argue over how to handle it, work around the terms of the will, and go to New York to handle the meeting. We even see Hank follow Maddie into the ladies’ room to buck her up before she faces the crowd. We see Maddie meet Hank’s secretary, who seems to be an enemy. And then…we see them back in Hanscomb Harbor congratulating themselves on a job well done. This reader was left saying, Huh??

Worse yet, all of this is told in a clumsy writing style, with the narration trapped somewhere between first person and third person viewpoint. Here’s a sample:

It occurred to Maddie that they’d covered quite a bit of ground. She meant conversationally speaking as opposed to actual road miles. The amazing thing to her, though, was that she’d been able to carry on a conversation at all with him, given the electricity that crackled in the air between them….Maddie couldn’t deny how her heart pounded when she stared at his profile. His appeal to her was so deep as to be on some cellular level. And her response to him could only be called primal, beyond rational comprehension, really. Okay, he was such a man. To the tenth power. Just innately attractive to women. Who knew why?

These sorts of dithering introspections go on, literally, for page after page after page. When the grandfather’s dog goes missing, Maddie knows exactly where she went, yet it takes 25 pages to go get her because of all the pauses for Hank’s thoughts, Maddie’s thoughts, and occasional conversation between them. By the time I finished this book, I wasn’t mad about Maddie. I was mad at her, and Hank, for alternately boring and aggravating me with their unbelievable, un-funny story.