Susan Elizabeth Phillips is one of my longtime favorite authors. I don’t love all her books or everything about her books, but I always know I will at least have a few hours of enjoyment. Heroes Are My Weakness is familiar ground for SEP – A down on her luck woman who disguises her fear with sass, a man who disguises his protective instincts with brooding or asshole behavior. As with Mary Balogh, Susan Elizabeth Philipps brings together wounded people who heal themselves as well […]
Persevere beyond the first third of the book, it gets better
In this clearly Gothic novel-inspired contemporary romance, unemployed and down on her luck Annie Hewitt has to spend the next sixty days in a small cottage on a remote island on the coast of Maine, because of complicated arrangement in her recently deceased mother’s will. Her closest neighbour just so happens to be Theo Harp, famous horror writer and her stepbrother for a time when they were teens. As a teenager, Annie had a big crush on Theo, but he was unpredictable and at turns […]
I wouldn’t mind taking my breathing room in Tuscany…
Years ago, I read a book by Susan Elizabeth Phillips called Glitter Baby. It was chick lit, but it wasn’t half bad. Boss, who purports to be a book snob but secretly devours celebrity biographies and the much jucier autobiographies, made fun of it, and now Glitter Baby is office shorthand for trashy romance novels. So when I was looking for something light (and free on the library’s website), I found Breathing Room, and figured that I couldn’t go wrong with another Phillips. Dr. Isabel […]
A Contemporary Romance with 19th Century Romance Elements
This right here is a contemporary comic Gothic romance novel. Equal parts Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Northanger Abbey, and likely other nineteenth century novels, mostly British, that I should have read while at university, Heroes Are My Weakness features a tortured hero, an innocent in over her head, schemes, machinations, a forbidding landscape, and a surprisingly unannoying plot moppet. Unemployed, impoverished, sick, and freezing, Annie has arrived on an island off the coast of Maine in January to take up temporary residence in a small […]