#CBR6 Book 83: "Nobody's Baby But Mine" by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Page count: 384 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Professor Jane Darlington has a genius level IQ, is a master physicist and desperately wants a baby. However, Jane's super smarts made her feel like a freak growing up, and she doesn't want any child of hers to experience the same thing. Plus she's currently single, and not really looking for a relationship. She does need to find herself a baby daddy, though, and preferably one who's a bit stupid, in the hopes that this will produce her a child with a thoroughly average intelligence.

Through some truly convoluted and complicated means, Jane sets her sights on Calvin "Cal" Bonner, the Chicago Stars quarterback, and manages to get herself pregnant. Cal, who's really very clever, wasn't planning on settling down, and normally doesn't date anyone over the age of twenty-two, is furious when he discovers that some brainy spinster is having his baby. No child of his, unwanted or not, is going to be born out of wedlock. So he forces Jane to marry him and takes her with him to his home town, so the press won't realise the that the playboy quarterback and the physics genius aren't actually madly in love. Since he's planning to divorce her after the baby is born, he doesn't want his family getting attached to her, and orders her to act horrible to them.

Seriously, the premise for this book is absolutely bonkers. The way in which Jane gets her first (and second) date with Cal and manages to get herself pregnant requires serious suspense of disbelief. Then there's the forced marriage, and Cal's desperate refusal to acknowledge that he's growing older and his career is nearing its end, so he dates women about half his age and refuses to even consider what he'll do once he retires from football. The argument they have when Jane discovers that Cal actually graduated top of his class in biology from a prestigious college and isn't just some hick jock, while Cal has discovered that Jane is a shocking 34 years old (when he believed her to be 28), is hilarious. Generally, the two have a lot of very amusing squabbles.

Jane is deeply uncomfortable with having to be rude to everyone in town, and Cal's family in particular. Cal drove me up the wall with his stupid refusal to grow up. His jealousy of Kevin, the younger quarterback who's hoping to take his place, was lots of fun. The secondary romance in this book is that of Cal's parents, who have grown apart (his mum even moves back home to her mother for a time) and need to reconnect. Cal's grandmother is awesome and realises the truth of Jane and Cal's feelings for one another long before they do.

I can see why this book is so popular among romance readers. It is eighteenth on the All About Romance Top 100 list, the absolutely highest ranked of all of Susan E. Phillips' books. The premise for the book is absolutely ridiculous, but once you get past the convoluted way in which the couple are thrown together, watching them bicker and gradually fall in love with each other was tons of fun. Some might find the extended Bonner family annoying, I generally liked them, which increased my enjoyment of the book.

#CBR6 Book 82: "Finding Colin Firth" by Mia March

Page count: 385 pages
Rating: 3 stars

Veronica Russo lives in Boothbay Harbour in Maine. She's a waitress at the local diner and also makes insanely delicious pies, that are very popular among the people in town. She even has pie-making classes. When she was sixteen, she got pregnant and had to give her baby up for adoption. She still feels as if some of the people she grew up with judge her for this, but is trying to get on with her life. She can't help but think about the baby girl she gave up, though, and hopes that some day the child may contact her.

Bea Crane is baby she gave up, but had no idea that she was adopted until a few weeks ago. A year after the death of her (adoptive) mother, she gets a letter that explains the truth about her origins. Bea is stunned. Recently graduated from college, and not all that happy with her life, she decides to take a chance, go to Boothbay Harbour and meet her biological mother.

Gemma Hendricks returns to Boothbay Harbour to visit old friends and to desperately try to decide what she wants to do with her future. She's an unemployed journalist, who's just discovered she is pregnant. While she's been happy living in New York City, her husband hates it and wants them to move to the little town where his parents ad siblings live. When she tells him about the baby, he's going to have even more ammunition for his plan to move them away from the city. While in Boothbay, she gets a temporary job writing a feature article about the young mother's home in town, where young girls who find themselves pregnant can find a safe haven until their babies are delivered.

All three women are united in their love of Colin Firth (because what woman in her right mind doesn't love the man and his varied film career), who coincidentally is coming to the town to film a movie. Veronica gets a job as an extra on the film set. Bea gets a date with one of the executive producers and Gemma hopes to be able to write a scoop about the film and perhaps get her career kick-started again.

Finding Colin Firth is not the best book to read when you're on a diet, trying to give up sugar and simple carbs. There are a LOT of descriptions of pies in it, because Veronica makes delectable and very popular ones. It probably also helps if you have at least a vague fondness for the actor Colin Firth and the many films he's done in his career, and over the course of the book, the main and supporting characters watch, think about or discuss a huge amount of the films he's been in. Strangely, the book didn't really make me want to watch anything with Colin Firth in it, but rather made me want to re-watch Waitress, the very sweet and underrated film with Keri Russell as a pie making diner waitress.

It's a nice, but not exactly mind-blowing book. All the characters seem nice, and I don't think I'd mind spending time with them if they were real. The book obviously deals with family, motherhood, identity, regret, doubts and insecurities. Boothbay seems like a pretty nice place to live, very picturesque. There are some romantic elements present in the book, but the most important relationships in the book are between women. I really wish I could allow myself to make and eat pies, but that would very much ruin my diet.

#CBR6 Book 81: "Greywalker" by Kat Richardson

Page count: 368 pages
Rating: 3 stars

After private investigator Harper Blaine wakes up in the hospital after apparently being legally dead for two minutes, she thinks she must be having hallucinations. Her world seems to get blurry, with grey mist, strange creatures and scary monsters more and more frequently. She is told to consult a university professor and his wife, who tell her that she's a Greywalker now. There is a nebulous dimension close to ours, between the human world and the after life, and those like Harper, who have been near death but returned, can access it.

Harper is really none too happy about her new powers and just wants things to go back to normal. She takes on a case to locate a missing college kid, as well as promising to track down a missing heirloom for a mysterious foreigner. As she keeps investigating her new cases, it becomes more and more obvious that she's going to need to control her entrances and exits to the Grey if she wants to survive to get paid.

This was July's main selection in the Vaginal Fantasy book club, and as I'm always fond of a good new paranormal series to sink my teeth into, I figured this was a good opportunity to try one of Kat Richardson's books. Unlike Spider's Bite, which I only barely felt I could rate 2 stars, I found a lot of potential in this book. I liked the sort of film noir feel to the book, with Harper being a P.I and doggedly insisting on endangering herself with solving cases, even after nearly dying. I liked that she doesn't just immediately take the news of the supernatural world and her new abilities in her stride, happily and almost instantly adjusting to the new status quo, which seems to be the case with some protagonists.

Unlike most of the Vaginal Fantasy picks, this book isn't very focused on romance or smexy times at all. There is some romance, but Harper is unattached at the end of the book and no obvious candidate for her long term affections appears to show up over the course of the book. There are some interesting supporting characters and I liked that she has a ferret (even though in my real life experience, they are smelly, badly behaved little beasts with very sharp teeth). That's the sort of detail that adds to the world building.

I wish the Grey had been explored and explained more in the book, but as we are getting everything from Harper's POV, and the people who are trying to teach her how to control her new powers can't directly access the Grey, I suppose it's not surprising that we can't get a massive info dump. I liked the various supernatural creatures, although it was painfully obvious to me what had happened to the college kid Harper is hired to track down long before she picks up on his trail. Although I'm not sure Richardson intended it to be some sort of great surprise either.

While there were bits of the book that got a bit confusing and vague, and I thought the final confrontation was a bit confusing, I think this series has promise, and with Kim Harrison's The Hollows series concluding in September, I am in need of new paranormal fantasy to entertain me. I will absolutely be reading more of these.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR6 Book 80: "The Kiss of Deception" by Mary E. Pearson

Page count. 496 pages
Rating: 3.5 stars

I finished this book nearly two weeks ago, and will therefore use the summary from Goodreads to explain the plot. Getting old and senile here, peeps.

In a society steeped in tradition, Princess Lia's life follows a preordained course. As First Daughter, she is expected to have the revered gift of sight - but she doesn't - and she knows her parents are perpetrating a sham when they arrange her marriage to secure an alliance with a neighbouring kingdom - to a prince she has never met. 

On the morning of the wedding, Lia flees to a distant village. She settles into a new life, hopeful when two mysterious and handsome strangers arrive - and unaware that one is the jilted prince and the other an assassin sent to kill her. Deception abounds, and Lia finds herself on the brink of unlocking perilous secrets - even as she finds herself falling in love. 

This is the first book in what the publishers are calling "a timeless new trilogy". There is a lot to like in the book, and also quite a few things that had me rolling my eyes or sighing with exasperation. The world building is interesting. It appears to be a sort of late medievalish world, but there are hints that all this came about after some sort of cataclysm, so it could well be that the sequels will reveal that this civilisation is actually post-apocalyptic and that the feudalistic type world they have now came about after modern technology collapsed on us somehow. There are three major countries involved in conflict, Lia is the princess and only daughter in Morrighan. She has several brothers, but because traditionally the first daughter of the royal family are believed to have visions, she is the one who is unable to live life as she chooses. As the king of the neighbouring country, Dalbreck,  is old, she's convinced she's being wed to a middle-aged man. She sent a missive asking him to meet before their wedding day, but received no reply. There are also, apparently, the barbarians of Venda and a number of travelling nomads who seem to be a version of gypsies, complete with caravans.

Refusing to be a political pawn and marrying a stranger, she and her best friend and handmaiden Pauline steal a couple of horses and run away on her wedding day. She also steals the hereditary, jewel-encrusted wedding cloak the women in her family have worn for generations, plus some ancient texts she's planning on translating. Girl isn't actually all that nice. Pauline and Lia run to a coastal village, where the princess quite happily settles down as a barmaid. She refuses to spend much time contemplating the diplomatic repercussions of her actions. Shortly after they have settled in the village, two handsome young men show up. The dark and brooding Rafe and the blond and burly Kaden.

The reader knows that one of the young men is a Vendan assassin sent to kill Lia to start a war, whilst the other is the Dalbreckian prince that Lia jilted. Most of the chapters are from Lia's point of view, but some are given to "the prince" and some to "the assassin". Later Rafe and Kaden get POV chapters, but it's only in the final third of the book that the readers, and Lia, discover which of them is the assassin, and I don't think it's much of a spoiler to reveal that the series' protagonist does NOT get murdered two thirds into the first book of the trilogy. Game of Thrones, this ain't. Lia doesn't realise that the prince came looking for her, and that he follows her once she is abducted by the assassin. Only at the very end does she understand that one of the dashing young men from the tavern is in fact her betrothed.

I like the potential in this series. Each chapter starts with excerpts from one of the ancient texts that Lia has in her possession, hinting at the history of the kingdoms and a prophecy, which Lia is obviously at the centre of. I would have loved more backstory on the various kingdoms, especially Dalbreck and Venda, but suspect that might be revealed in future installments. I really liked the narrative device with the two men, without knowing which was which. The uncertainty of their identities builds the tension nicely.

The first third of the book is rather slow, and Lia is frankly behaving like a spoiled brat in much of it. I get that she's none to happy about being married off to a stranger, but she's lived a life of luxury and wealth, and doesn't have the right to decide that she'd rather be a commoner in a tavern just because Mummy and Daddy didn't show her enough affection or let her meet her fiancee before the wedding.  Not when said decision can create international strife and possibly start a war. However, she's clearly also led a very sheltered life, and matures quite a bit over the course of the book, coming to realise all too clearly what difficulties her actions may have caused.

There is a love triangle, which was one of the things that made me roll my eyes. I wish this trope would stop being a necessity in almost all YA fantasy.  The fact that I didn't actually know whether it was the prince or the assassin she was falling in love with, helped. Both Rafe and Kaden are interesting and rather complex characters and the fact that you don't know which is the more morally compromised one until more than halfway through, is cool. The second part of the book, especially the last third, was a lot more action-packed and fast-paced and this is where I really got sucked into the world. I will absolutely be checking out the next book in the series, and hope it's an even stronger installment than the first.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR6 Book 79: "Heaven, Texas" by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Page count: 384 pages
Rating: 4 stars

The ridiculously named Bobby Tom Denton was Chicago Stars' famous quarterback until he sustained a career ending knee injury. Now he's unsure of what he's going to do with his life, and deeply frustrated about it. When the tenacious and bossy Gracie Snow turns up on his doorstep and announces she's going to escort him to his hometown Telarosa (formerly Heaven) in Texas to start shooting the action movie he agreed to star in. Gracie's spent most of her life living a sheltered existence, working in a retirement home, and is now determined to make her new job as a production assistant a success. If she can't get Denton to Texas on time, she'll be fired.

More used to leggy, promiscuous models than prim, mousy virgins, Bobby Tom is fascinated with Gracie, but not really all that interested in following her orders. When he finally does arrive on the film set, more than half a day late, he discovers that his selfishness has dire consequences for Gracie, however. She's fired, and devastated. He demands they hire her back, as his personal assistant, agreeing to pay her salary. As Gracie has already shown that she refuses to take any kind of charity from Denton, and is appalled by how many people who seem to be blithely taking advantage of him and sponging off him, the producer agrees to pretend she is still paid by the film studio.

It seems like every single person in Telarosa and the surrounding area has some eligible woman they want to introduce to the former quarterback, now future action star. Bobby Tom is sick of all the attention and declares that Gracie is his fiancee. To make this a convincing charade, he also gets his widowed mother to give her a makeover. Of course, as soon as she starts dressing her age, applying some makeup and has a decent haircut, Bobby Tom Denton is not the only man in Telarosa to notice Gracie Snow. What is he going to do if she decides that she has enough of him bossing her around, and takes off with someone else?

Mrs. Julien skipped this book because she just couldn't deal with a hero named Bobby Tom. I agree that the name is truly ridiculous, but the book is pretty much a funny romp. As seems to be the case in a lot of Phillips' books, there is also a secondary plot running through the book, involving an older couple, in this case Denton's widowed mother and the richest man in town, who is hated by nearly everyone and keeps threatening to shut down his tech company, which would be the final nail in Telarosa's coffin. He's been in love with her since they were both in high school, but never thought he could have her, and proceeds to blackmail her into dating him, in a manner that I frankly found quite despicable, but he is also filled with very believable remorse afterwards, and grew on me as a character.

Bobby Tom is quite ridiculous and I frankly don't understand why Gracie put up with him for so long before putting her dainty foot down and telling him what's what. He's used to being an adored playboy and having had his career drastically cut short, never took the time to consider what he wanted to do once football was no longer an option. Emotionally immature but sexually experienced, he seems to think that giving Gracie a makeover and seducing her is doing her a great favour, never really stopping to take in how much she's improved his life since he met her. While he's self-centred, he's also nothing but courteous, kind and far too generous with everyone around him, even when they are taking advantage of him both financially and emotionally. He doesn't seem to think that he should ever say no to anyone, and cannot for the life of him understand why Gracie won't take the expensive gifts he wants to give her, or insists on paying rent to stay in the spare room above his garage.

Gracie is awesome and my favourite part of the whole book. She's the reason I'm giving the book 4 rather than 3.5 stars. Having devoted herself to helping others in her mother's care home until said mother retired to Florida, she is finally trying to create a new life and identity for herself. Used to surrounding herself with pensioners, she's a bit overwhelmed when she starts making friends her own age and really blossoms when she starts settling in Telarosa. She sees Bobby Tom for who he is, both his good and bad qualities, and hates that everyone around him seems to take him and his tremendous wealth for granted. Since Bobby Tom barely has anything for her to do as his assistant, she makes herself indispensable on the film set, doing everything from running the catering truck to babysitting, as required. She's determined not to let Denton see how head over heels in love with him she is, knowing that they are from such vastly different worlds that she doesn't have a chance of him loving her back.

With the exception of the beginning of Denton's mother's romance, which was a bit creepy, and a minor subplot involving an old girlfriend of Bobby Tom's and the jealous town sheriff, her fiancee, which just didn't work for me at all, this was a very fun, and quite often silly romp. I can see why it's still on the Top 100 list over at All About Romance. Plus, I can now say that I've read a romance where the hero was called Bobby Tom. Never thought that was going to happen.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR6 Book 78: "Spider's Bite" by Jennifer Estep

Page count: 432 pages
Rating: 2 stars

Gin Blanco is an assassin. She goes under the name The Spider. Her weapon of choice is knives and she's very good at her job, something she will rarely shut up about, even in times when people are trying to kill her. Gin lives in a world where there are a number of elementals, controlling fire, ice, earth, air, water, stone, even electricity and the like. Gin is a stone elemental and can also control ice. If you forget, she'll remind you every third chapter or so.

Gin is hired to take out a business man at the opera, but is double-crossed. Someone tries to kill her, and they succeed in killing her handler, Fletcher Lane, who raised her and trained her to be an assassin after her family was killed. She manages to rescue his son, Finn, before they manage to torture him to death too. Together with Donovan Caine, the only honest cop in the city, Gin and Finn (see, it rhymes) try to get to the bottom of who hired Gin and killed Fletcher.

I'd heard a lot of good things about the Elemental Assassin series by Jennifer Estep. Most of the books have a higher than 4.0 rating on Goodreads. I like paranormal fantasy, I like assassins, I like unusual female protagonists. This book started out intriguingly, with Gin having had herself committed to an asylum to take out a dodgy psychiatrist, but went downhill so fast. When the book is narrated in first person, and you find said narrator hella annoying, it's going to be difficult to get into the book.

There's some promising world building, but because I was so annoyed with the "tell, don't show" narration, and the frequent repetition (really, most pertinent points are mentioned again and again - Gin's tragic backstory, her choice of weapons, her "no kids or pets" policy, her attraction to Donovan Caine and all the smexy things she'd like to do to him if she got the chance, but oh, he hates her because she murdered his corrupt partner). None of the characters appeared to have much depth or were all that interesting to me, again probably because Estep keeps telling me about them instead of showing through their actions why I should care about them.

I bought this on sale a while back, and am glad I didn't pay full price. Unless people can convince me that the other books get a LOT better (I know a lot of paranormal fantasy series have rough starts, and take a while to get going), this is not going to be a series I continue with.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR6 Book 77: "It Had to Be You" by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Page count: 384 pages
Rating: 3 stars

Phoebe Sommerville is a bundle of daddy issues and sexual hangups, masquerading as a drop-dead gorgeous blonde bombshell. Clever, sensitive and oh so very vulnerable, Phoebe learned long ago that the best way to keep men at a distance and getting her own way is by pretending to be a sexy airhead. Estranged from her horrible father since she was 18, having done as much as she could to shock him, Phoebe is shocked to realise that even after his death, he is trying to manipulate her. His will stipulates that she has inherited his successful NFL team, the Chicago Stars, and has to stay in Chicago and run it until some big pre-Super Bowl championship (I know NOTHING about American football. Football to me, a Norwegian, is soccer. I finished this book more than two weeks ago and can't be bothered to go back and find the relevant name). If the Chicago Stars win this championship, she will keep the team (and rob her douche-wad cousin out of the inheritance he was sure he was going to get). If they lose, she will at least get enough money to start the gallery she's always dreamed of owning. To add to her complications, Phoebe also becomes the guardian of Molly, her fifteen year younger sister, who hates her because she believes their father loved only the eldest, and was the sort of stand-up guy to really leave his daughters with crushed self esteem.

Phoebe decides that dear old dad, the team and the terms of the will can screw it. She tries to befriend her sister, with little success. Dan Calebow, former star quarterback and the new coach for the Chicago Stars is not going to let some bimbo keep his team from achieving their chance at victory, though. His extreme masculinity is everything that Phoebe finds most attractive, but also terrifying. She agrees to do her share in the running of the team, but forces Dan to keep on the geeky Ron McDermitt as general manager. As they start working together to get the Stars to their championship, Dan starts to realise that Phoebe is not the ditz she appears. Having a wealth of insecurities and hangups of his own, due to women not treating him right, Dan now wants to find the perfect little homemaker who can bear his children. It very much complicates things when he keep his thoughts or hands off Phoebe.

It Had to Be You is the first of seven books in Susan Elizabeth Phillips' Chicago Stars' series. As Phillips has no fewer than eight books on All About Romance's Top 100 Romances (last compiled a few months ago),  and seven of those books are this series, I pretty much had to see what all the fuss was about, and I believe in starting at the beginning. This book was written in 1994, and it's quite clear that contemporary romance (and romance in general) has come a long way since this book was written. Even so, it's clearly beloved by many, as it's 19 on the top 100 list. I found a number of things problematic with the book, though.

I really couldn't stand Phoebe's father (which is probably as it should be). I also hate when rape is used as a character-building plot device. One of the things that caused Phoebe to run away, was that she was raped when she was seventeen, and her father refused to believe her. This led to her ending up in Paris and getting even more disillusioned about sex as she tried to get over her shame, before discovering that she could dress and act provocatively, but constantly reject the men around her, thus keeping herself safe. Her best friend is gay. Her scandalous and elderly artist lover was gay, although few know that.

Dan's ex-wife is a congresswoman who's bossy and into all sorts of kinky stuff and never wanted kids. Even after their divorce, they keep meeting for random hook-ups, because Dan can't really say no to her. He had an abusive father and a weak-willed mother and is determined to give his own kids the love, stability and idyllic home life he himself never achieved. He believes he's found the perfect candidate to be his baby mama, a timid, quiet nursery school teacher, who he obviously wouldn't dream of even touching inappropriately before marriage. He's convinced Phoebe doesn't have a maternal bone in her body, never getting close enough to her to realise that a stable, harmonious family life is what she has dreamed of her entire life. He has no problems using her to get rid of his pent-up sexual tension, but is surprised at how innocent and inexperienced she seems in the bedroom.

Molly, Phoebe's younger sister, is a brat. I didn't like her much, but again, douchy daddy did a number on her, so her trust issues are probably justified. Unfortunately, she's not really fleshed out much as a character and barely rises above annoying plot moppet level. Some of the other supporting characters are delightful, though. I loved Ron, the geeky general manager, who Dan is forced to realise does a really good job even though he's not a jock, and Viktor, Phoebe's gay BFF.

In my experience, current contemporary romances don't have quite as much unnecessary drama as this book does. There are some truly preposterous obstacles in the way of Dan and Phoebe's HEA, both external and emotional. The final act of the book is, as my partner in romance reviewing, Mrs. Julien points out, ridonkulous. I rolled my eyes more than a little bit. I suspect I would have liked the book a whole lot more if I'd read it when it came out.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.