Tangled up in Love was a tough book to review because even though there were definite problems with it, I liked it anyway. It was a hard book to get into because from the beginning it seemed somewhat contrived, unlikely, and awkwardly written. But to my surprise, the story soon sucked me in. Despite certain misgivings about these characters and their relationship – and just what the book was trying to say about relationships between strongwilled people, I found that I enjoyed it after all…just not enough to recommend it.

Stacey St. Cyr is a workaholic city girl from New Orleans who was left at the altar and now is determined to avoid attachment, successfully substituting her work for any kind of emotional life, or so she thinks. She’s on her way to a much needed vacation at a spa, taken only at the insistence of her business partner, when her beloved dog suddenly becomes sick . . . right in the front seat of Stacey’s immaculate sedan. It’s the middle of the night when she pulls into the improbably-named Doolittle, Arkansas, population: next to nothing. Although she should be calmed when the vet reassures her that it’s nothing serious, she’s anything but – and it’s all the vet’s fault. Dr. Mike, as he’s known to the locals, has her hot and bothered enough to spill out an unlikely lie – that she’s researching retirement homes for her supposedly happily-married parents – for an unlikely reason that isn’t revealed for much of the book. Now Stacey she has to deal with two problems: how to get herself out of the mess she’s inadvertently caused with her lie, and how to get away from the dangerous emotions that the good doctor has evoked, when all she seems to want to do is stay right by his side.

Michael Halliday is a single dad and small town vet with a soft heart, and a strong will. His first wife, a stereotypical “evil ex” named Pauline, was a business woman who always put her career before anything else, including Mike and their two daughters. They’ve been divorced for several years, and she’s moved on greener pastures, but Mike has had a hard time finding a woman his girls don’t hate on sight. And of course, he won’t make the same mistake again by getting involved with a woman who is so centered on her career (stop me if you know where this is going). But he can’t seem to keep his hands off Stacey, and he decides within 24 hours of meeting her – despite not having had much actual conversation with her – that she is the woman he wants to marry, and to be mother to his children. Now he just has to convince her.

Love at first sight is a favorite theme for some, and a nail in the coffin for others, but it can sometimes work for me, and sometimes not. This time, I can’t really say it did. I wasn’t convinced that either of them fell in love within the space of 24 hours, since I didn’t feel like either of them knew enough about the other. They’re both still stereotypes, both to the reader and to each other, at that point, making it hard to believe that they could so quickly form any kind of real emotional attachment. They do develop into likable, sympathetic characters throughout the course of the book, and there was almost enough relationship development by the end of the story to make me believe they had come to fall in love with each other by then. But at first sight? Count me an unbeliever, at least in this case.

There’s a lot going on in this book, perhaps too much, but a lot of it centers around the relationships between strong-willed people. Most of these are about romantic relationships, but Mike’s relationship with his 12-year-old, sensitive-on-the-inside, tough-as-nails-on-the-outside daughter Kristin comes into play as well. A lot of Stacey’s reluctance to fall in love comes not only as a result of her own experience, but also of her parents’ difficult marriage and divorce when she was very young. This makes her sympathetic toward Mike’s daughters’ position, but the ending, which I won’t spoil, sends somewhat mixed messages about whether or not strong-willed people can really make a marriage work, or whether or not they can avoid repeating the history of Stacey’s unhappy parents.

My other main complaint is that the prose in this book is rather off-putting. I’ve never been one to complain about a frequent pet peeve of others, that of single-sentence paragraphs; I’ve seen them used well, and they can be quite effective. But the English grad in me shudders at the combination of single-sentence paragraphs with grammatically incomplete phrasing, especially in repetition, as in this example:

Stacy could well be his salvation.

Not a quick fix.

But a woman to bring him out of the slump he’d suffered for the past several years.

A woman with the energy of the city, the brains, the beauty, the intensity that he hadn’t experienced since his first few months with Pauline.

Those few golden weeks when they’d found so much in one another that fascinated them. Those days in which they’d cast all care and precautions to the wind.

Those fateful moments in which Kristen had been conceived.

This kind of prose can really throw the reader out of the moment, and there are more than a few incidents of this style throughout the book.

All in all, I wouldn’t consider this a terrible read, but it’s not the first book I’d recommend, either. Beverly Brandt’s debut True North from last year handles the workaholic-heroine-meets-laid-back-hero scenario better, for example. But, while based on a huge number of stereotypes and features some unlikely premises (the reason Stacey lies to Dr. Mike early on is truly lame), this book had its own charm, and I’d definitely give author North another chance.