Be warned: if you don’t like baby books, stay far away from this one. The entire book revolves around a woman who wants to get pregnant more than anything else. If, on the other hand, you like baby books, this might be the one for you.

Laura Merritt wants a baby. Badly. She’s going to have one with her friend, Fletcher, while keeping the relationship strictly platonic. When he hears of her plans, Cort Dimitri, her old flame and the man who broke her heart, wants to change them. He lures her to his home in Atlanta with the promise of investing in her and Fletcher’s business, intent on changing her mind and relighting that old flame.

While I’m disinclined to read baby books in general, I don’t totally avoid them but there’s there’s nothing about this one to make it stand out. The story does not break any new ground and the characters are okay, but neither one particularly drew me in.

Cort has the “I’m not good enough” routine down cold. He’s fabulously wealthy and good looking, but he used to be a poor immigrant who occasionally had to do unsavory things to get by. He loves his sister, and is loyal to his friends. He left Laura “for her own good.” He thought that she’d be better off without him and made the choice for her. Court has to come to terms with his love for Laura. As for Laura, her baby fever drove this book. In the course of her parenting plan, she becomes introspective and starts to rediscover her “inner woman” and come to terms with the relationships in her life.

The treatment of the secondary characters was rather superficial; those who did show up weren’t around for long and were mostly two-dimensional. In a story with such a single-minded focus, this can pose a problem. Had the secondary characters been of more substance, they would have created a much-needed distraction from the overbearing “I want a baby” plot.

The prose tended to be somewhat purple as well. Here’s an example: “How she wanted to taste his kiss again! To feel his hands and mouth on her. To fan his banked heat into a raging inferno.”

Aside from the purple prose, there’s nothing exceptionally bad about this book. It’s just that’s it is so totally focused on baby fever, that all other elements of the story were swept away. All in all, it’s nothing to get excited about.