In the opening chapter of Yvonne Prinz’s All You Get Is Me, 15-year-old Roar Audley and her father witness a horrific head-on collision between an SUV and a pick-up truck on a highway in the countryside outside San Francisco. The woman driving the SUV is an obnoxious yuppie housewife who escapes unscathed. The woman driving the truck – a Mexican illegal immigrant – dies in hospital. Roar’s father vows to pursue justice on behalf of the Mexican woman, while Roar develops an unwelcome crush on the SUV driver’s teenage son.

It’s a good opening, and the reader’s curiosity is immediately piqued. It takes Prinz, who hails from Alberta but now lives in California, a few dozen more pages to fully flesh out the scenario and introduce the broader cast of characters, and we wait for the match to be dropped onto this gasoline spill.

But it never comes. Instead of escalating the conflict, Prinz retreats. At every hint of confrontation, the novel sidesteps anything nasty. There are threatening notes, secret romances, frightening encounters, but all of it comes to nothing. Worse, there are lengthy scenes that seem secondary to the plot, and in which nothing much happens.

Not even nasty corporations are permitted to be villains here. Eventually Roar must depose on what she saw the day of the accident, and although the scene injects a few pages of welcome drama into the book, her testimony is so solid the yuppie’s insurance company quickly settles out of court with barely a squabble. And with that, the novel hobbles on for almost 50 more pages to its tepid, celebratory ending, as the young couple consummate their summer romance before the boy has to run off to college.

It has become unfashionable to criticize fiction for lack of story, but All You Get Is Me seems to promise much that is never delivered. Some readers may enjoy the novel’s romantic elements, but on the whole it’s hard not to see the book as a failure.