Love with a Warm Cowboy

When Barbara Door, an English professor, is unceremoniously dumped by her live-in lover, she escapes from Kansas City to spend the summer at a Wyoming dude ranch run by an old friend. Barb's vacation plan is simple: to find herself ``a warm cowboy--hat, boots, tattoo . . . and a room-temperature IQ.'' But Barb decides she's looking for more than that when she meets Hal Simmons, a local farrier. Hal and Barb hit it off as friends and lovers, but the relationship is complicated by the emotional baggage they both bring: Hal's wife walked out on him without warning just as Barb's lover (of whom, alas, we hear far more than the plot demands) left her. Though this tale has the superficial qualities of a formula romance--a genre Barb despises--it isn't one. Carroll ( Annie Chambers ) does not brush aside her characters' problems with a happy ending. She deserves credit for trying to make a tough story work, but she fails to draw readers in, perhaps because Barb herself is only a third-rate academic blessed with more ego than intellect. (Feb.)