Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I love Susan Elizabeth Phillips. Natural Born Charmer is is my top 5 romance reads. Susan Elizabeth Phillips writes great books – this isn’t one of them. I could barely finish it. Let’s get into why. This is a damaged-heroine-saved-by-love trope. And therein lie the problems. The heroine is terribly damaged. She has major grief issues, her huband died suddenly and she reacted by leaving her family and her home and her job and fleeing to a ramshackle hut in rural Tenessee. This is a woman that needs a psychiatrist not just some good loving by the hero. Tess is a midwife and she dances nearly naked in the cold winter rain to deal with her grief. This leads to a bizarre first chapter in which she is joined by a pregnant woman who takes off her clothes too. Anyway- pregnant woman says she is hero’s wife and goes in labor in the middle of a storm. Of course Tess has to deliver the baby and then pregnant woman dies horrifically of amniotic fluid embolism of all things. It’s ok- she wasn’t a nice person anyway, she wasn’t even married, the liar- she only existed so she could die and advance the plot. Of course- now Tess takes care of the premie baby, which is a terrible burden for anyone but for someone who is already dealing very badly with grief and then a huge professional catastrophe like losing a patient- it is just a recipe for disaster. This whole book is like looking on in horror as a train wrecks itself. Spoiler alert: So yes- she takes care of the baby while staying in the hero’s house. The hero, who is pretty much inconsequential to the story, is some kind of genius American not-Bansky with a MOMA exibit who has lost his mojo. He finds the baby’s father and the grandparents come to take baby home. This is good for baby right? But no, Tess now has a psychotic breakdown and runs away with the baby because she wants to keep it. She gets tracked down and then asks the grandparents to give her the baby because she is engaged to not-Bansky hero. Not-Bansky hero is understably surprised to hear this lie and instead of now calling a psychiatrist, he sleeps with Tess and agrees to the charade so Tess can keep this baby. Don’t worry, turns out the father is not the father at all. No one knows who the father is, so all this is fine. The hero and heroine have zero chemistry, I skipped half their scenes. There was a scene dealing with daubing her with paint which seemed unhygienic and very difficult to clean. Other annoying sideplots include the story being set in the most horrible town in the world where everyone is just mean and nasty. Tess who is an RN is now so shattered that she works at a coffee shop, cleaning their toilets and taking grief from the town women who are just bitchy to her all the time. The town is full of homesteaders who draw their semi-automatic rifles on everyone and don’t believe in medicine until Tess schools them and fixes them. The town is also a hot bed of teenage sex because they only teach abstinence education- don’t worry- Tess fixes that too. There is also a mean politician, Tess fixes his relationship with his wife and makes him see the error of his ways too. Sigh! Also why does Tess have no friends from her previous life, no family? Does no one really care about her mental health at all? Very bizarre So the book ends with hero and heroine living happily ever after with the baby in the town with the mean people and Tess is now cured of her depressive psychosis and the teenagers of the small town are all having safe sex and the crazy loners in the hills have medical care and I don’t think I will be auto-buying any more SEPs in the future.