Ever picked up a book you just could not get into? No matter how hard you tried, no matter how many efforts you made, it just never happened? Well, this is the problem I had with Til There Was You. If I hadn’t made the personal commitment to read this book in order to review it, I would not have finished it. The last book I read by Ms. Michaels was From a Silver Heart, which was a great read. It’s hard to believe the same author wrote both books!

There is nothing wrong with the basic story line here. Leah’s father, alias The Savager (guess that says it all), was so brutal that her mother took 10-year-old Leah and fled from his grasp. The mother then died, leaving Leah to spend the next ten years behind convent walls where she apparently learned to be so gentle, she cannot even form complete sentences . . . with . . . without . . . pausing to . . . to say some . . . something vapid. There were so many of these pause devices scattered throughout Leah’s conversations, she came off looking like a complete airhead.

Baron Gavin de Bec is a warrior with a heart of gold. He cares deeply for his people. To honor the trust they have placed in him, he does everything he can to improve the lives of even his poorest subjects. He sends to the local convent for two women to come to Hawkesgrave to tend the almshouse, a refuge he is building to house and tend the less fortunate (is this a nice guy or what?). When Leah and her feisty friend Mave arrive, it is in the midst of battle. Gavin watches Leah perform an act of bravery, which endears her to his heart and causes him to lust after her.

Though she falls in love with Gavin, Leah knows a relationship, at any level, is impossible because of the promise she made to her dying mother that she never reveal to anyone who her father is. Apparently unable to assess that a prospective husband who is kind, loving, considerate, gentle, thrifty, brave, and cheerful might be a good candidate with whom she can share her trust, Leah instead spurns Gavin’s advances, and the poor man cannot figure out why. When Gavin finally beds Leah, I think my blood-pressure actually went down. I may have nodded off . . . I . . . I don’t . . . .re . . . remember.

There’s more, but not much. I think the effort here was to create two nice people who find true love, but it just didn’t come off. The characters are so bland (I would scream that word in frustration if I could), I didn’t care what happened to them as long as I got out alive. Poor editing (there were several typo’s and sentences that I had to read several times to finally grasp their meaning), one-dimensional primary and secondary characters, action at a pace a snail would find irritating, and even the use of the O-word (yes, “orbs”), had me chomping at the bit to finish the thing and move on.

Til There Was You might have been a good first draft. With major character development, genuine sexual tension, revved up dialogue, and decent action (the characters mostly stand around discussing the time of day), this story might have taken off. But it didn’t, not even a little.

Tell you what, skip Til There Was You and read From a Silver Heart and you’ll be mu . . . much . . . hap . . . happier.