'Heaven, Texas' by Susan Elizabeth PHILLIPS

Gracie Snow has been sent on an impossible mission. Recently recruited as a production assistant to Windmill Studios, Gracie has been given the seemingly impossible task of shepherding ex-football star turned movie star to the set of his first film.

Bobby Tom Denton is a football legend – he won two superbowl’s with the Chicago Stars and looked to be on a winning streak before a blown knee saw him retired at the age of thirty-three. He agreed to star in his first feature film only as a way to pass the time before deciding on a new career path.

Bobby ‘B.T.’ Tom Denton really has no interest in being a pretty boy actor… and poor Gracie is going to have her work cut out for her trying to convince this egotistical, chauvinistic jock that the world doesn’t revolve around him.

I read the first book in Phillip’s ‘Chicago Stars’ series (‘It had to be you’) and hated it. But I’d heard good things about ‘Heaven, Texas’, so thought I would give the 2nd book a go before writing off the whole series.

In retrospect, I should have listened to my gut.

Gracie is a sickeningly sweet Mary-Sue. She describes herself as ‘homely’ in appearance, and even after a makeover Bobby Tom can only ever muster a “she’s cute” compliment. But what Gracie lacks in ‘va-va-voom’ she makes up for in sugary sweet personality. Gracie used to run her families nursing home before choosing a different career path as a production assistant. Even after deciding to leave her old life behind, Gracie can’t help but visit the local nursing home of B.T’s hometown – simply because she enjoys hanging out with the old folks. Yep, Gracie spends her free time at the local nursing home. Gag.

Gracie is also a 30-year-old virgin. She says that growing up around old people stunted her hormones, and so it’s up to Bobby Tom Denton to initiate Gracie in the pleasures of the flesh… double gag.

Gracie is such a ludicrously angelic character that it’s hard to like her (or relate to her). She’s pretty endearing when we first meet her (sporting a bad perm and schoolmarm outfits) but Phillips keeps ramming her syrupy sweetness down your throat to the point of dry-heaving.

Bobby Tom Denton is a pretty atrocious leading man. I don’t know why, but Phillips has a serious love for male chauvinists. I initially liked the idea of a series centred around a football team and its players – I thought the characters would offer up plenty of Alpha male testosterone, but also give Phillips an opportunity to poke fun at the ‘dumb jock’ prejudice. Instead Phillips seems to revel in writing leading men who conform to such misconceptions;

But he preferred his women blond and flashy, with legs up to their armpits and porn star breasts. Real live sex trophies, that’s what he liked, and he wasn’t going to apologize for it either. He’d earned those sex trophy females on the bloody battlefield of the NFL.

What makes B.T’s inherent sexism even worse is how quickly Gracie falls in love with it. Despite acknowledging his chauvinistic ways, and realizing he has an ego the size of Texas – Gracie is smitten with B.T. from the get-go and falls in love with him fairly early on. And the main reason she gives for her feelings is that he’s very handsome (making her just as sexist as he is, in many ways). The whole relationship is pretty atrocious – and to top it all off the sex scenes are stilted, and sparse.

Surprisingly ‘Heaven, Texas’ does have a small amount of spark – but it’s not between Bobby Tom and Gracie. There’s a secondary romantic storyline going on between Bobby Tom’s widowed mother, Suzy Denton, and the town’s local villain, Way Sawyer. Way and Suzy went to high school together – she was homecoming queen, while Way was the bastard son to a local girl who claimed to have been gang raped when she was sixteen. Despite social differences and Suzy’s romance with B.T’s father, Way had a fierce crush on her all through his adolescence. In describing their school dynamic, Way says he was a; “dime store James Dean trying to impress Natalie Wood”. Now, year’s later when Suzy is widowed and Way holds the town’s future in his hands, he propositions Suzy to become his mistress and save the town.

Suzy and Way’s romance is sizzling, made even sexier for their interesting back story. Bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks falls in love with the homecoming queen – I liked it. Way and Suzy share a Jacuzzi together, and that particular scene is hotter than all of B.T and Gracie’s stifled couplings put together.

I hated this book, and am now officially giving up on Susan Elizabeth Phillips. The secondary storyline in ‘Heaven, Texas’ does confirm that Phillips can write good romance and a decent sex scene – but I don’t have the confidence or patience to wade through any more of her books.

1/5

'It had to be you' by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

From the BLURB:

The windy city isn't quite ready for Phoebe Somerville-the trendy, outrageous and curvaceous New York knockout who has just inherited the Chicago Stars football team. And Phoebe is definitely not prepared for the Stars' head coach Dan Calebow - an Alabama-born former gridiron legend and blond barbarian.

Calebow is everything Phoebe abhors - a sexist, jock tacskmaster with a one-track mind. The beautiful new boss is everything Dan despises - a meddling bimbo whose doesn't know pigskin from a pitcher's mound, So why is he drawn to the shameless sexpot like a heat-seeking missile? And why does Dan's good ol'boy charm leave cosmpolitan Phoebe feeling awkward, tongue-tied and frightened to death?

I really, really didn’t like this book, which is a shame. I actually had really high hopes for this contemporary romance. I liked the idea of a series being based around an American football team; a chance for some great contrasting characters and Alpha men. Not the case.

I really didn’t like the main character, Phoebe. She’s a ‘poor little rich girl’ with some genuinely awful incidents in her past. For one thing, her father was an atrocious parent – wounding her self-confidence from a young age and deeming her “his only failure” in her adulthood. For another, she was raped when she was 18 and never fully recovered. In response to her traumatic first sexual experience, Phoebe uses her sexuality as armor. She is very curvaceous and a proverbial ‘pin-up’ – but she hasn’t had sex in 15 years and at 33-years-old feels like a failure as a woman. She uses her curves as a defense against men – as a way to control them but leave them wanting and never suspecting that she never intended to ‘put out’ despite what her ‘come hither’ eyes were saying.

I can understand that Phillips wanted Phoebe to be a conundrum of a character. She acts like a ‘bimbo’ but underneath she’s really a shy, sensitive young woman who uses her sensuality as a defense against men and hasn’t been sexually active in 15 years.

I don’t understand why Phoebe couldn’t have been a woman who enjoys sex. I see no problem with women owning and flaunting their sexuality – it doesn’t make them ‘sluts’ or ‘bimbos’ – it makes them women who enjoy sex. This book was written in 1994, and I suppose women have undergone a transformation since then – strong, aggressive woman aren’t pariahs thanks to characters like Samantha Jones (‘Sex and the City’) or celebrities like Angelina Jolie who own their sexuality and aren’t afraid to flaunt it. But Phoebe was a lamb in wolf’s clothing, at least by my reckoning. I think she would have been a far more interesting character if she had been the blonde bombshell the media and men made her out to be; instead of the inwardly timid, sexually-oppressed woman she actually was.

I also didn’t like Phillips handling of Phoebe’s confession to Dan about her rape. So much of Phoebe’s persona is based around that event in her life, which colored her entire sexual outlook – but Phillips didn’t write a scene. Instead, she wrote a summary, along the lines of ‘Phoebe told Dan about the rape’. After so much build-up, Phoebe’s confession should have been a cathartic scene of release; but what we get is a one-line summary of the confession. Now that’s just sloppy writing.

Dan Calebow is a terrible leading man. Phillips has written what is quite possibly the worst introduction of a romantic hero in the history of contemporary romance. We first meet Dan on his way home from a black-tie event, as he stops in at a gas station. At this gas station is a 16-year-old girl wearing a short skirt and football jersey – she comes on pretty hard to the infamous Dan Calebow and he agrees to follow her home, since her parents are away. At this point I was feeling pretty much sick to my stomach. I continued to feel queasy as Dan proceeded to have sex with this sixteen-year-old girl, and Phillips details the encounter for three pages or so…. And then it’s revealed that this girl isn’t actually 16, or a stranger to Dan. It’s actually his ex-wife, Valerie, who he divorced last year but still engages in these sexual fantasies with while the two are between partners. Okay, so the good news is the books leading man isn’t actually a pedophilic slime-bag – the bad news is, Phillips introduction of Dan Calebow is so grotesque that it colors his character for the rest of the book. I could never warm up to him. Phillips tried hard to let readers know Dan wasn’t the typical football jock, but failed dismally. I really didn’t appreciate his treatment of Phoebe, for one thing. Even after he’s discovered her sensitive side and learnt of her abusive past sexual history, Dan still refers to Phoebe as “his sweet, smart, gutsy little bimbo”. This book is pretty much one big slap in the feminist face.

The sex scenes aren’t even that hot. They’re actually pretty tame, and I don’t know if that’s because this was written in 1994 and Phillips was being a bit conservative – or if it’s because Phillips just doesn’t excel at writing erotica?

The plot of ‘It had to be you’ is also pretty atrocious. You’d think the plot would be pretty straightforward – football team tries to win the Superbowl. But Phillips (for some reason) felt the need to include a mad gunman in her book as well. A man whose steroid-taking son was kicked off the Stars team and later died in a car accident is stalking Dan Calebow, who he blames for his son’s death. In the last half of the book the gunman kidnaps Phoebe and holds her hostage at the last game of the season, threatening to kill her if Dan doesn’t throw the game. Yeah. It’s as bad as it sounds.

This book is bad. But I have heard good things about the 2nd book in the ‘Chicago Stars’ series called ‘Heaven, Texas’ – so I will give Susan Elizabeth Phillips one more chance.

1/5