Tribute, by Nora Roberts

When I channel-flipped past Lifetime’s made-for-television adaptation of Nora Roberts’ novel Tribute a few days ago, I thought it looked ridiculous—the TV equivalent of spray-can cheese, with a few low-budget sex scenes and action sequences thrown in. But after I got the novel in my Easter basket, I was even more disgusted, because (in addition to being badly cast, terribly acted, and poorly shot) I realized the movie adaption had totally missed the point of the book.

When former child star Cilla McGowan moves to Virginia, she plans to restore the crumbling farmhouse that once belonged to her famous grandmother, a Marilyn Monroe-like movie star who committed suicide before Cilla was born. While cleaning out the attic, Cilla discovers a mysterious collection of love letters from her grandmother to an unnamed local man, suggesting that there may have been more happening during the last few months of her life than anyone realized. With the help of her neighbor (a sweet tempered, just-geeky-enough graphic novelist), Cilla starts asking questions, and soon discovers that one of her new neighbors would do anything to protect this decades-old secret.

Despite the, uh, seething sensuality of Lifetime’s promo images, there’s almost no romantic drama in Tribute. On the contrary, I have rarely encountered a more angst-free romance. Cilla and Ford meet, like each other tremendously, date for awhile, kick off an A-grade sex life, and (despite some initial reservations on Cilla’s part regarding her family’s troubled past) end up engaged and deliriously happy. They get along like a house on fire, and their sunshine-and-flowers romance gives Roberts plenty of room to focus on what she’s really interested in: the manifold joys of home remodeling!

There are solid romantic and suspense storylines in Tribute, but this is really a book about rehabbing a house. The novel is split into three sections (“Demo”, “Rehab”, and “Finish Trim”), and Roberts devotes almost as much time to replanting gardens, re-finishing woodwork, and installing granite countertops as she does to fleshing out the secrets surrounding Cilla’s grandmother’s death. By the end of the novel, I had lost interest in the mystery, most of which I had figured out by the halfway mark, but I was seriously worried that the villain might burn Cilla’s house down. (I mean, what would she do? Could she really afford to replace the Craftsman-inspired plasterwork with the shamrock medallions? Because those sound totally expensive.)

If you’re not a fan of HGTV, the detailed descriptions of every step of Cilla’s remodel will probably start to drag, but they’re typical of the author. Nora Roberts is billed as a romance novelist (by everybody, not just Lifetime), but her true love is writing about people’s jobs—she has lavished attention on careers ranging from “diner waitress” to “professional glassblower”. If you have no interest in the particular occupation she’s featuring, you can always put the book down and try a different one, but they are all, at some level, about work. Contrary to what Lifetime would have you believe, the sexy banter, brooding stares, and heaving bosoms are just window dressing.