RomanceEverAfter

Book Reviews Cafe

Contemporary
Review by Donna DeFalco

Once Upon A Blind Date
by Wendy Markham
aka Wendy Corsi Staub (suspense novels)
Warner Forever, March 2004

Wendy Markham's new book "Once Upon a Blind Date" explores the modern-day electronic yenta known as Internet dating with sometimes hilarious and often poignant results.

Margaret "Maggie" O'Mulligan thinks her best friend Dominick Chickalini needs a wife. That's probably because she's tired of picking up his dry cleaning, but more importantly, so he can settle down and quit flirting with his latest blonde du jour. Charlie Kennelly thinks his best friend and neighbor Julie Purello needs to stop moping about her messy breakup with a chef and find herself someone new. Both Maggie and Charlie find their friends a potential mate via an on-line dating service called "Matchmocha, Matchmocha," which combines a coffeehouse with matchmaking.

On their first blind date, the four meet at a Knicks game in Madison Square Garden. Julie and Dominick couldn't be more different, but Charlie finds himself strangely attracted to the pushy, driven Maggie. Maggie can't believe she left her rural hometown in Wisconsin only to find a man very much like her sports-crazy brothers and father in her adopted home town of New York. Charlie is an avowed bachelor. Maggie daydreams about someday being married to her sort-of fiancé who a globe-trotting doctor helping the poor in foreign countries. And yet, Charlie appeals to something wild in Maggie, something that hasn't been touched in years.

Markham has taken a break from her alter ego, Wendy Corsi Staub (www.wendymarkham.com), a New York Times best-selling author of suspense novels, to pen a warm romance about the pitfalls and unexpected pleasures of Internet dating.