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Rating: 
Summary: No Romance
Review: I can't say that I enjoyed this book very much. It started out with promise, but it lost all appeal for me about halfway though. For one thing, there was very little romance, or mutual attraction between the characters. They were kind-of attracted to each other, but nothing solid. Even at the end, I was not quite sure if the two of them were going to get together. The story revolves around a 44-year-old bachelor (Charlie Feldman) who has an overwhelming urge to find a wife and start a family. Lacy Gazzar, who is a co-worker, befriends Charlie and coaches him on the dos and don'ts of parenting (she has a 17-year old daughter), relationships, writing personal ads, etc., etc. Well one thing leads to another and Lacy ends up pregnant. The big problem is that Lacy is not sure if Charlie is the father of the baby (it could be the child of a guy she goes line-dancing with). Lacy agrees to have the baby as long as Charlie takes full responsibility for it, and she does not have to acknowledge or in any way associated with it. She even tries to illegally remove her name from the baby's birth certificate. Lacy definitely had some issues. I also found the First Person style of writing very confusing. Normally I enjoy first person, but in this book both Lacy and Charlie were narrating. When I would start a new chapter or section, it would always take me a few sentences to figure out if it was Charlie or Lacy speaking. They both refer to themselves as "I", so I would have to figure out from the content who was speaking. Granted, each chapter was labeled with a date and a name (Lacy or Charlie), but I still found the style confusing and annoying.
Rating: 
Summary: Give this book a chance
Review: If you read the editorial and site reviewers, you've got a clue what this book is about. I read this when it was first published, I hunted through the public library to get the unabridged audio version for a road trip. This a book I come back to now and then as a comfort read/listen. The dialogue is bright, snappy and edgy, and the characters are real to me. The female protagonist is not an easy person, I think it takes compassion and a bit of darkness in onself to understand the attraction of a "difficult" woman. I appreciate the first person viewpoint, especially with respect to Charlie, much of what the author has him say about men is true to the way they think and express themselves amongst themselves. The cursing, the companionable silence, the simultaneous contradiction of male vulnerability to and dismissiveness of women. One of the key attractions of this book for me is that Markey doesn't wrap this into a predictable HEA ending. Any number of things could happen to the characters, but the nice thing, for Charlie, his clock started ticking in a different rhythm. Yeah, I did give this 3 stars, three stars is good.
Rating:
Summary: Dropping the ball
Review: This was a great book, if you count the ending. The characters are funny, and the style is pretty good if you don't count the stunted switches between narrators. The plot was definitely interesting enough to keep me, but the ending leaves much to be desired. In fact, half of this book bugs me to no end, and despite them being pretty decent characters, what they agree to will make you furious. However, knowing that romance novels generally have happy endings, I persevered and was disappointed when Judy Markey completely dropped the ball. In the very last seconds of the book, she patched up everything with minimal cohesiveness. In other words, I couldn't imagine the characters doing what they ended up doing. Without a more drawn out ending, this book is not worth the time. Read it (or listen to the cassette) if you have little else to do, but you're better off with a more stable romance novelist like Jayne Ann Krentz or going and renting yourself a romantic comedy.
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