Judges of the Bulwyer-Lytton contest, have I got bad opening sentence for you!

“The Harley roared and bucked and writhed under his muscular thighs as wildly as a fresh border whore. And since he was half-Mexican and half-Anglo, and oversexed to boot, Roque Mayo was just the man to know.”

Okay, so it’s two sentences, but aren’t they awful? And there is a lot more to place this one firmly in Bad Book Territory. Take the name Roque – how do you pronounce that? Rock, Rook, Rohk, or Rocky? Plus heroine’s name is Ritz and her best friend is named Jet. We have feuding families, bad boys, spoiled rich girls, lust and sin and I’m only getting started.

The book begins with Roque driving into town on the Harley. Evidently the vibrations have overstimulated him to the point where all his blood has gone to his groin. Roque is driving down the interstate going about 120, and doesn’t even see the construction going on. So he has to slide the cycle under a couple of trucks and then drives off to a chorus of one finger salutes. He crashes the funeral of Ritz’s husband, takes off upstairs with the widow, then tells her he’s going to marry her since she is pregnant with his child. Okay.

Flashback 11 years earlier.

Ritz is fourteen, living on her daddy’s ranch and she’s sneaking around trying to see Roque’s “thingy.” When she finally does, he’s peeing against a rock (or is that rook?) a few feet from where she’s hiding in the grass. Ick! Anyway, we find out that Roque’s father hates him, his half-brother Caleb hero-worships him, his family and Ritz’s family hate each other, Ritz’s father is disappointed in her because she isn’t a second son, and there’s a whole lotta dysfunction going on.

Well, Caleb and Ritz become friends but then her brother takes exception to them dancing together at the high school and they all take off in their cars. Someone runs Caleb off the road, the car wrecks and he dies, then Ritz and her brother run off the road and his neck gets broken. Then Roque comes back for the funeral, his father threatens to kill him, he and Ritz have sex, then they break up, Roque gets married and divorced, Ritz gets married and widowed, they get back together, they hate each other, they love each other, they have a bout of hot sex, swear eternal love and that’s all folks. Oops, I forgot to mention we finally find out who ran Caleb off the road.

I read Marry A Man Who Will Dance in a state of bewilderment. I couldn’t believe a book this bad could get published. At first I began to mark some of the more incoherent sentences, but the book had a mark on every page. Here are a few examples:

“Still, she got an eyeful of sleek, brown torso under that wet shirt that seemed made of nothing but ripply muscle.”

I don’t think that is what’s meant by a muscle shirt.

“Why was watching him do the most ordinary things so fascinating?
“The keen sweetness of hay being cut somewhere made her heart ache. Or was it just him, balling his dirty socks and stuffing them into his boots that made her heart feel so strange?”

Can you say non-sequitur, boys and girls?

“She ripped her silky fingers that had his groin in an uproar from his throat.”

I would love for someone to explain that sentence to me.

So the writing is more than just a tad awkward, and the plot is a mess. Then, how about the characters?

They are inexplicable. Both Ritz and Roque (sounds like some kind of cracker and cheese hors d’oeuvre doesn’t it?) change emotions in between the syllables of a word. They hate each other, they love each other, they lust for each other, they boink each other, they hate each other, they love each other. I got dizzy.

Right now, this book has no competition for the worst book of 2002, but maybe there is a way to salvage it. Let’s see now, first we get a plot that makes some sense, then we get characters who act plausibly. Change the setting, then do a total re-write. Keep the title though, that’s the only good thing about the book.