DANCING AT THE HARVEST MOON

McKinnon (a pseudonym for a ``respected literary novelist'') baldly attempts to grab Bridges of Madison County's audience with this tale of a divorced woman's encounter with the handsome son of her first love. Maggie McIntyre never meant to get divorced, and she never meant to return to the Harvest Moon, the dance hall where she'd worked summers during college and fallen in love for the first, and possibly the only, time. But when she turns up a pack of love letters from her old heartthrob, Robbie Flaubert, his words bring back a flood of memories of the grand house by the lake in Ontario, where she waited tables before running off with him to the forest to make love. Realizing that the Harvest Moon was the only place she'd ever been happy, 47-year-old Maggie leaves Kansas City to try to recapture that happiness—hoping to find Robbie still there. Instead, she finds the Harvest Moon boarded up and for sale, her once-best friend, Claire Findley, back in town after a series of divorces, and her beloved Robbie dead of a heart attack after having married locally and fathered a son. Still, Maggie is so enchanted by the area that she decides to buy the old dance hall herself, refurbish it, and begin a new life. She advertises for a handyman, hardly suspecting that Robbie's son will volunteer—and that he'll be as handsome, sexy, and admirably independent as Robbie himself. Is Maggie's attraction to this younger man real, or just a morbid fascination? Can one fall in love with the son of one's first love, and if so, have a life with someone so much younger (and virile)? Despite the transparent efficiency of substituting the love interest's son for the original—and despite the truly shameless level of sentimentality and bathos—McKinnon may have hit the jackpot. (First serial rights to Good Housekeeping; TV rights to TriStar; Literary Guild main selection)