TBT: Natural Born Charmer by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

This week for my TBT I raided my cache of early book reviews and this is one of the earliest I could find.  Forgive the redundancy of words.  Even reading this review again made me laugh out loud and had me wanting to reread this book.  I hope you pick it up sometime and give it a chance and even though it's in the middle of a series, you can read it as a stand alone.

Title Natural Born Charmer

Author: Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Publisher: William Morrow

Release Date: Feb. 6th, 2007

Chicago Stars quarterback Dean Robillard is the luckiest man in the world: a bona-fide sports superstar and the pride of the NFL with a profitable side career as a buff billboard model for End Zone underwear. But life in the glory lane has started to pale, and Dean has set off on a cross-country trip to figure out what's gone wrong. When he hits a lonely stretch of Colorado highway, he spies something that will shake up his gilded life in ways he can't imagine. A young woman . . . dressed in a beaver suit.

Blue Bailey is on a mission to murder her ex. Or at least inflict serious damage. As for the beaver suit she's wearing . . . Is it her fault that life keeps throwing her curveballs? Witness the expensive black sports car pulling up next to her on the highway and the Greek god stepping out of it.

Blue's career as a portrait painter is the perfect job for someone who refuses to stay in one place for very long. She needs a ride, and America's most famous football player has an imposing set of wheels. Now, all she has to do is keep him entertained, off guard, and fully clothed before he figures out exactly how desperate she is.

But Dean isn't the brainless jock she imagines, and Blue—despite her petite stature—is just about the toughest woman Dean has ever met. They're soon heading for his summer home where their already complicated lives and inconvenient attraction to each other will become entangled with a charismatic but aging rock star; a beautiful fifty-two-year-old woman trying to make peace with her rock and roll past; an eleven-year-old who desperately needs a family; and a bitter old woman who hates them all.

As the summer progresses, the wandering portrait artist and the charming football star play a high-stakes game, fighting themselves and each other for a chance to have it all.

Natural Born Charmer is for everyone who's ever thought about leaving their old life in the dust and never looking back. Susan Elizabeth Phillips takes us home again . . . and shows us where love truly lives. 

REVIEW

From the moment I picked up the book and turned it over to read the blurb on the back I was hooked by the first sentence, ‘It wasn’t everyday a guy saw a headless beaver walking down the side of the road.’  After that I was hooked and I knew this book would be a winner.

           

            Dean Robillard is a quarterback for the Chicago Stars, he is taking a break thanks to his injured shoulder and is taking a road trip when he happens along said beaver walking down the road.  Too interesting to pass by, Dean decides to stop and offer a lift to the mascot of which just happens to be the mascot of my college, Oregon State.

            Blue Bailey has had to live life the only way she knew how.  Shipped from one home to the next when a child, she has found that life as a child is not that much better than life as an adult as she sits in the passenger seat of Dean’s Aston Martin with her hair flying in the breeze.

            Interweaved in this funny and touching book is the story of Dean’s younger step sister Riley and her own search for her sense of place and a family’s struggle to come together again after a lifetime apart.

            You will cry, you will laugh, you will sigh but you will definitely agree that the cast of characters will definitely charm and captivate you.

Susan Elizabeth Phillips could not have done it better than this heartwarming, laugh out loud read.  This is definitely one for the keeper shelf.  Five stars.