Reading Prairie Song is the mental equivalent of swallowing a whole jug of maple syrup. Maple syrup is great stuff — in small, calculated doses. Masses of it, however, can be overpowering, even make you sick. This book contains too much sentimentality and too many cliches that, taken individually, would have been barely noticeable, perhaps even necessary for the conventions of romance storytelling. As it is, the book is painfully saccharine, and reaching the final page is a relief.

The plot itself is an amazing amalgam of various romance formulas and high melodrama. Kate Chandler is a runaway servant pregnant with her employer’s child. New York millionaire Edgar Talmidge and his wife had been unable to conceive a child; to avoid having their fortune passed to another branch of the family they decided to rape and impregnate Kate, who looked enough like Mrs. Talmidge to be her sister. Kate managed to escape, and heads for Arkansas City to participate in the Oklahoma land run and build a new life on the frontier.

Talmidge sends a hired killer, Cole Youngblood, to hunt Kate down. Cole, however, is essentially a decent guy. He has qualms about killing a woman — after all, real men don’t hurt the fairer sex — but he needs the generous bounty because he has just been unexpectedly saddled with his dead sister’s three orphan children (Joey, Willy and Lydia). By an Amazing Coincidence he happens to be in Arkansas City too and almost runs over Kate at the train station. By another Amazing Coincidence, the telegraph Cole received detailing his commission was garbled and gave the wrong name, so Cole doesn’t realize that the woman he is hunting for is right under his nose. Kate, however, is aware of Cole’s reputation. By a series of unlikely rationalizations and events, Kate and Cole agree to a marriage of convenience. They proceed to fall in love, and things start to look rosy — until the evil Talmidges show up looking for their runaway maid and potential heir. The way Cole finally figures out what is happening is preposterous; when the line “It was far-fetched enough to be true” appears anywhere in a book, you know the plotting has hit the rock bottom.

The biggest problem with Prairie Song is the way it is written. Crucial action scenes are cut out and told to us in large summarized chunks instead of being shown, such as Kate’s life in New York, or the hazardous journey taken by Kate, Cole and the young ‘uns to the border of the land run. There is also too much internal musing. In fact, at one point, Cole literally stops what he’s doing and starts pondering about his past and his feelings for his father, who left him and his sister when they were children. Kate muses endlessly on the right thing to do and the lies she is telling. To add to the problem, the ellipse is abused liberally. Almost every page is peppered with the darned things. The ellipses, combined with the constant interruptions in the action, make the flow of the book hesitant and jerky.

The constant soul-searching by itself would not have been too bad, though, if it had not been so unconvincing, especially on Cole’s part. Cole is far too soft to be a believable hired killer. He indulges in some extremely drawn out self-psychoanalysis and realizes that he makes a career out of hurting people essentially because of his father’s abandonment, which is such a New Age cliché that its appearance in a historical makes it doubly offensive. The other characters are equally two-dimensional. Kate is the spunky, stubborn lower-class heroine with roaring maternal instincts. She rarely thinks of Cole’s nephews and niece without prefixing “sweet” or “precious” or both, and she is rabidly protective of the child within her, despite its means of conception. The children are appropriately adorable and precocious — Lydia, the youngest, promptly names the dog they adopt “Miss Kitty,” which would have been amusing if the whole book hadn’t been so cloying already. The Talmidges are so evil they are ludicrous, and sometimes they act so illogically that they left me scratching my head.

Prairie Song tries hard to be a heartwarming story that is gritty and action-packed at the same time. Perhaps its biggest problem is that it tries too hard, resulting in the print equivalent of a Sunday afternoon Movie Of The Week. If you like your romances super-sweet and you don’t object to the occasional hole in the plot, you might enjoy this book. However, if your gag threshold is low, you’ll probably want to skip this one.