Natural Born Charmer
Avon - Avon
Release date: 2008-04-29
Mass Market Paperback
Author: Susan Elizabeth Phillips
American Light Romantic Fiction, Fiction, Fiction - Romance, Romance: Modern, Contemporary Women, Romance - Contemporary, Fiction / Romance / Contemporary
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Natural Born Charmer
Date undefinedThis is the 6th (if I'm counting correctly) book in the series featuring the Chicago Stars football team.
How can you resist a book that starts with a headless beaver walking down the side of the road?
Said beaver is Blue Bailey, who's been abandoned after doing a roadside advertising gig. She's picked up by Chicago Stars quarterback Dean Robillard, and they immediately start to irritate each other. And yet somehow, she ends up accompanying him on the drive to his farm in Tennessee.
Natural Born Charmer could just stick with that much story and be cute and clever and fun. But it goes much further than that. Both Blue and Dean have abandonment issues in their pasts--both had neglectful parents, to say the least, and the reason Blue took a job as a beaver is that the boyfriend she went to Colorado to be with left her for someone else, and she's broke because her mother emptied Blue's bank account to fund a rescue.
We meet Dean's parents as well as his young half-sister, and the romantic comedy part of the story becomes the framework for a much deeper tale of families, love, neglect, abandonment, and forgiveness. The characters are all very vivid and larger than life, all complex and neither good nor bad. All of them are struggling with various issues.
Parts of Natural Born Charmer were hard to read because they hit a little close to home, and parts made me angry (like Dean's solution to Blue's inability to trust him), but they all fit the story and the characters, and I finished it feeling emotionally exhausted and satisfied, which is for me the perfect result.
Natural Born Charmer
Date undefinedI have become a SEP junkie and have plowed through almost every book of hers I can get my hands on in the past month or so. This was a great heart warming story of family, love,redemption, second chances and healing. The characters are well thought out and stay with you long after the last page is turned. What I love most about SEP's witting is how realistic her characters are and how their flaws make up who they are.
Dean & Blue are so darn funny together I laughed out loud more times than I could count. I just fell in love with Nita and watching the relationship between her and this family of characters unfold.
Natural Born Charmer
Date undefinedI am noticing that I either love an SEP book, or am a little annoyed. This book, had me a little annoyed. I felt the h/h had almost ZERO chemistry, the things that each of them did would never happen in real life and it left me wanting to hurry up and finish the dang audio book and start another one. Even Kate Fleming/Anna Fields, the fabulous reader she is, couldn't make this one any better. In fact, if I would have read it, it may have ventured in the 2's. I felt Dean deserved a much better story and this was mediocre. It seems SEP has this formula to write a story, separation, some universal complication, a secondary romance, heroine quirky. Is it just me? I don't know. With her hits like Ain't She Sweet and Match Me If You Can, I can't shelf her. But some of her books, like this one, I'd like to.
