Wedding Bell Blues is a rather nice story about an intelligent young woman striking out on her own, and finding a little love on the way. There’s nothing exceptional about it, and the hero is a bit dim, but I thought our heroine’s journey was worth reading.

Moni Lawrence is a small-town girl whose beloved Aunt Reggie just left her a sizeable inheritance. She leaves her hometown and her high-school sweetheart and moves to San Diego, hoping to start a business of her own. And guess what – she doesn’t go back!

As this book opens Moni, exhausted after a long drive and confused by the unfamiliar San Diego streets, veers off the road into a man’s yard, almost striking the half-naked resident with her car. The man drops the towel he had wrapped around his waist and flees, and Moni, entirely distracted by the sight of his fine form, drives right through his fence. The man is Grant Forrest, her new neighbor. Since Moni is now legally obliged to replace his fence – and since she’s determined to do the work herself – she’s going to be seeing a lot of Grant.

That episode is funny, but that’s not all; it illustrates a lot about Moni’s personality. She’s not dumb, but she is certainly prone to getting into scrapes. She is quite capable of getting out of them all by herself, but she suffers from what she calls DDS – Damsel In Distress Syndrome. Her petite body and innocent face lead people, especially men, to attempt to save her, fix her mistakes, and make decisions for her. Soon Grant is trying to solve the problems of his sexy little neighbor, which is the last thing Moni wants from him or any man.

Grant is a twice-divorced marriage counselor (!) who is taking a summer’s sabbatical to try and write a novel. His last divorce left him scarred, lonely, and certain that he’ll never find the right woman. He resists his attraction to Moni mightily, without success.

I enjoyed Moni very much. She seems like such a likable person, the kind I’d like to have for a best friend. She’s a three-dimensional character, one who is aware of her own faults and acknowledges her mistakes, often with wry humor. She’s honest, ambitious, and a little bit naïve, but she knows what she wants and she just has to figure out how to get it. Her sunny, determined, lighthearted personality is by far the best thing about this book.

On the other hand, Grant is somewhat annoying. I understand that he’s a little confused after his divorce, but this guy’s signals could not be any more mixed. He kisses Moni, then tells her he’s not interested. He reminds her that he’s not interested, and then practically seduces her on the couch. He apologizes for the almost-seduction, and then has sex with her. He invites her to dinner specifically in order to split up with her, making sure to break out the candles and flowers. I couldn’t fall for a guy like that, because I’d be spending too much time trying to figure out what is going on in his convoluted mind.

Grant is a nice guy, but he’s a terrible, terrible communicator. Which is kind of funny, considering that he’s a marriage counselor. At one point he thinks to himself, “He’d made a living helping couples communicate with each other, but all his skills had been irrelevant to his personal life. What good was communication if he couldn’t find the right woman?” Oh, I dunno; maybe good communication would help you to know whether you’ve found the right woman or not? It isn’t just that he seems incapable of expressing to Moni how he feels; he also doesn’t listen to her when she tells him how she feels. For instance, he imagines that Moni is exactly the kind of high-maintenance woman his second wife was – a woman who needs a man to solve all her problems for her. No matter how hard Moni tries to convince him that she can take care of herself, it just doesn’t sink in. He continues to try to fix Moni’s life for her until she was fed up with it, and so was I.

There’s not really too much plot in this 372-page novel, which makes the pace rather slow. There are lots of little subplots and secondary characters, some of which are funny and charming, and some of which are boring and make the book feel padded. I also think that Ms. Amos’s writing style could stand to be a little more sophisticated and polished.

So I have a few problems with Wedding Bell Blues: a slow pace, some simplistic prose, and a hero who has a little too much in common with a box of rocks. But this book’s heroine, Moni, is likable enough that it’s worth reading – and so, with reservations, I recommend it.