When you come across this on page 17, you know you’re in trouble:

“With a squeak, she turned to the camera and just about died, knowing that her cheeks had to be bright red. Her, the award-winning, hard-hitting newswoman blushing like a teenager. ‘I hope you’ll join us next week when I head out to Tumbleweed Trails for a chat with a rodeo superstar.'”

Now, not only can I not imagine any “award-winning, hard-hitting newswoman” squeaking, let alone just about dying on live television, I am appalled at the thought of any grown woman squeaking and just about dying anywhere. Add in the author’s excruciatingly irritating pronoun misuse (more on that later), and the heart and soul of any thinking woman unlucky enough to pick up this book will hit the dirt at the thought of 344 more painful pages ahead.

Remember that recent thread on one of AAR’s message boards titled What Were They Thinking? Unfortunately, I know what the publishers were thinking here: Let’s put out a series about three ditzy (but really cute) heroines, put them in Texas (always a sure-fire bet), add in a secret baby, some “cute” and really “now” emails, and we’ll make a mint. Sad to say, they might be right.

Kate Bloom is a 27-year old newswoman whose audience tends to take her too seriously. (That’s a problem for all hard-hitting, award-winning broadcast journalists, you know. If only their audience would see them as cute!) At the urging of one of her two best friends, station owner and future heroine Julia, Kate attempts to lighten up by hosting a new show called Getting Real With Kate. When her first cooking segment doesn’t pan out (sorry) at the last minute, that oh-so-cute Julia turns up moments before air time with Jesse Chapman, “notorious bad boy and superstar” golfer. The result? All that squeaking and just-about-dying on live television.

Jesse, it seems, was Kate’s childhood crush and the object of a youthful embarrassing declaration of such. Julia, best-est friend that she is, coerces Kate into allowing Jesse to hide from the media hounding him after he heroically (so the media says) saved a woman who collapsed in front of him on the golf course. Jesse moves in, but within days, a bad, skanky woman on her way to Vegas shows up on Jesse’s doorstep with a twelve-year old she says is his. Within seconds, Jesse agrees to allow the son he never knew he had to spend the summer with him.

So, while Kate attempts to show her audience she’s really a fun girl, she and Jesse awkwardly fight their mutual attraction and engage in some really cute I-can’t/you-can/I-can’t episodes with each of them alternating in the “I can’t” role until it all turns out happily in the end!

Suddenly Sexy is a prime example of what a lot of AAR regulars complain about endlessly: The dumbing down of romance. Kate is worse than just plain old TSTL – she is lethally TSTL. Consider this:

“‘What?’ Jesse blurted out, before he shook his head. ‘Katie, Katie, Katie. It’s always when she tries too hard to do something crazy that she gets herself in trouble.’ Then he whistled. ‘If she’s trying to reinvent herself, let me tell you, Travis, we’re in for big trouble around here.'”

So, not only is Kate cute and scatty, she also needs regular rescuing!

It’s not like I can’t enjoy entertainment centering on, shall we say, dumb women. To me Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion is nothing less than the highest of comedic art. (Hey, I’m proud to be a biz-niss woman.) But the critical difference is that the people behind Romy and Michele – including Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino who brought them so to brilliantly to life – know that their main characters are dumb. I get the feeling that Ms. Lee doesn’t.

And, yes, it is official, I am becoming my mother because Ms. Lee’s repeated pronoun problems drove me nuts. Along with that oh-so-memorable page 17 stinker, you’ve got “he made some comment about him and tools” and “him and Derek.” Ms. Lee, you’re close on this last one, but the speaker or writer always puts themselves last. This, of course, begs the question: Does Ballantine employ copy editors and, if so, did they all skip school whenever pronouns were the subject?

There’s one more thing I have to mention. One of the really cute segments on Kate’s show involves a pet psychic who hands Kate a cat and purrs: “You must pet your pussy.” Well, my cheeks turned red, I let out a squeak, and just about died laughing!

In case you can’t tell by now, I find it incredibly infuriating that this book is being offered up to innocent readers by a major publisher. And there are two more? Perish the thought! A month from now when I’m Borders-browsing and my unsuspecting gaze lands on Sinfully Sexy, the sequel to this abomination, I’m going to do what I always do when the sight of something is just too painful. Look away, Sandy, look away.