Ten years ago, Julie Gates had a humongous crush on her high school English teacher Marc Johnson. She doodled his name in the margins of her books and even took one of those “Attraction Factor” quizzes one finds in every issue of Seventeen magazine. The results of the quiz were a stunning 98% – they were made for each other! Of course he never knew this and she eventually graduated and moved on to other things. Now it’s ten years later, Mr. Johnson owns a bookstore and Julie is a CPA who’s been sent by her accounting firm to help him file his business taxes. One look at each other and it’s instant attraction. So, the problem must be that he used to be her teacher and feels guilty and conflicted and can’t get past the awkwardness of the situation, right? No. That hardly even comes up. Instead Marc’s just an insensitive jerk.

When Marc thinks Julie is just a pretty former student, he’s perfectly happy to flirt with her. But when she wants to get her hands on his accounting, he acts defensive and condescending, and assumes she’s an airhead. This doesn’t lessen Julie’s feelings for him one bit, and she works hard to convince him to date her. When they eventually do start dating, he blows hot and cold and keeps shying away from making a “commitment.” Marc acts like he’s trying to be a cool high school boy instead of a mature adult. He supposedly has reasons; in fact he has a Big Secret – but this secret of his is only a secret from Julie. Virtually everyone else and his brother knows about Marc’s past indiscretion, and his decision to keep it from Julie reeks of an author trying to manufacture conflict. Of course Julie will find out from someone else, leap to the wrong conclusions and nearly ruin the relationship. Anybody could have told him that’s going to happen, and in fact his business partner does – to no avail.

Julie and Marc date for several months, but the reader is rarely privy to anything that goes on on these dates besides what they eat and what they wear. We only know that for most of this time, they don’t have sex because of Marc’s hang-ups. Much more attention is paid to Julie’s conflicted younger brother and his relationship with Marc. Julie’s family could have defined the term “dysfunctional”. Even though both of her parents are alive, her 15-year-old brother Kenny is living with Julie and behaves like your typical teen. Julie makes every stupid parenting mistake in the book, but luckily Marc is there to make it all right again. This is just about Marc’s only redeeming characteristic. Truthfully, it is not at all clear what Julie sees in Marc besides the fact that he used to be her dreamboat English teacher. And we don’t get to know Julie very well either. She’s a competent CPA who can’t figure out her brother and who wears too much jewelry – that’s about the extent of her. It’s difficult to muster any emotional connection for these two at all.

And that’s a real shame. The focus felt all wrong in this book. Julie and Marc’s developing relationship should have been extremely touching and fraught with all the tensions of a former student/teacher dynamic, but it’s not. Indeed, their past relationship is completely irrelevant to the plot, and might as well have never existed. Contrast this with Suzanne Brockmann’s The Admiral’s Bride where the latent hero worship the heroine has for the hero is the major source of conflict between them. That’s the sort of story I expected given the premise, but I was sorely disappointed with The Attraction Factor.

One last note: Early on when Kenny is nagging her about dinner, Julie thinks amusingly to herself that he can be “such a putz sometimes.” This was all wrong. There’s no indication at all that Julie or her family has a Yiddish background. What’s worse, putz is a highly derogatory word which does not work in this context (I even looked it up in The Joys of Yiddish to be sure). It would be like thinking her brother could be “an a__hole” at times instead of “a pain in the neck” which is what the context called for. The misuse of this term struck an extremely sour note with this reader.