NATURAL BORN CHARMER

Author: Susan Elizabeth Phillips ISBN: 9780060734589 5/2008 CONTEMPORARY Publisher: AVON

Chicago Stars quarterback Dean Robillard is the luckiest man in the world. But life in the glory lane has started to pale, and Dean has set off on a 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. As for the beaver suit she's wearing . . . Is it her fault that life keeps throwing her curve balls? Witness the expensive black sports car pulling up next to her on the highway and the Greek god stepping out of it. 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.

RRAH's THOUGHTS AND PONDERINGS:

A football star, an artist and a rock star (plus an aging groupie) walk into a romance novel. Susan Elizabeth Phillips manages to pull off an engaging novel despite all the traditional industry no-no's.

Dean Robillard is too perfect. The quarterback for the Chicago Stars, the thirty-one-year-old is also a male model and the son of a huge rock star and his former model girlfriend. This have-everything guy meets the girl who has nothing when he finds artist Blue Bailey stranded on the side of his road near his vacation home. All her money has been stolen and she's lost everything.

NATURAL BORN CHARMER is about finding family. Blue and Dean are estranged from their loved ones and haven't settled into adult lives. It takes a troubled eleven-year-old to set events in motion that can give them both a family and life together.

I enjoyed the book a great deal. It's not perfect, but it's pretty close!

Heather Hiestand