Turn Left At Sanity
Can Emmylou Sargent, heiress and young proprietress of the Shady Lady B&B;, save small-town Beaverton, Idaho, from the evil clutches of out-of-town corporate honcho, Joe Montcrief, who wants to build-of all things-a cat litter factory? Warren (Bad Boys Down Under) sets her formula romance amidst an array of secondary characters whose exaggerated quirks and eccentricities-a kleptomaniac who returns all she steals, a deluded fireman who waters plants in response to shouts of "Fire!", a self-styled Napoleon on horseback-quickly lose their humorous fizz. Despite the predictable execution, however, Warren's premise is admirable: that the slow pace of life in a backwater town, where everyone puts up with each other's idiosyncrasies, has its benefits; that there is value to a place where human contact is an integral part of life and where work is not the end all and be all of existence. A fascinating side plot about a sexual pioneer who came to the town in the early 1900s to build a sanitarium, and whose theories about healthy sexual release echo the orgasm theories of Wilhelm Reich, unfortunately gets short shrift. Warren's heavy-handed jokes about the Shady Lady's past as the town brothel and its use by so-called "intimate healers" when the sanitarium was functioning don't add much nuance to the plot. The author is at her best writing steamy sex scenes-and the novel has plenty of these-but, outside the bedroom, Joe and Emmylou, with their stereotypical interests (him: cell phones, laptops and 24/7 work; her: cooking, flowers and "oh, so cute" town folk) come off as a flat, uninspired couple.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.