Susan Mallery: Sizzling

MY REVIEW

Sizzling
Series: The Buchanans, Book 3
Author: Susan Mallery
Release: January 1, 2007
List Price: $6.99

Read: August 25-26, 2009
My Rating:


Author Homepage | Excerpt | Book Trailer | Amazon.com

SUMMARY (from back cover)
Reid Buchanan was always a fan favorite on the baseball diamond. But between the sheets?

A spiteful article about the former pitcher and current playboy questions his talent in the bedroom. And the newspaper's just the first bad news. Reid's grandmother Gloria's broken hip means she needs constant care - but Reid hired Nurses 1 and 2 for their bedside manner with him. So for Number 3 he chooses Lori Johnson, the first candidate who seems immune to his brand of charm.

Lori's never wasted her time with amoebas like Reid Buchanan. So why are her well-fortified defenses starting to crumble under the force of his sexy smile - and the kindness he shows her at every turn? There's only one explanation for the feelings flaring between them - chemistry. Chemistry so hot, it's sizzling!

SERIES: The Buchanans

1. Delicious (February 1, 2006)
2. Irresistible (July 1, 2006)
3. Sizzling (January 1, 2007)
4. Tempting (July 1, 2007)
   

BASICS
This is my first Susan Mallery book and I'm not sure I'm going to be giving her another try. I'm almost tempted to give Sizzling 2.5 stars, but it wasn't absolutely horrible and Mallery is a good writer, technique-wise; I mean, there are no run-on sentences, her punctuation is correct, she writes good romance scenes, the characters are pretty interesting ... I don't know, the story just wasn't as compelling as other romances I've read. I was actually anxious to finish the book, but only because I wanted it to be done already (once I pick up and start a book, I have to finish it - it's sometimes a curse).

I did like Reid a lot and I kind of went back and forth on Lori. Reid was an interesting hero and very engaging; I think that the way he changes his behavior was very believable and I liked his honesty and straight-forward manner. The scene where Reid walks in to find two surprisingly naked girls in his bedroom and then runs off to get Lori to kick them out was very funny.

MAIN PROBLEMS

1. I felt like we're plopped into the story too quickly, since we don't get to see the hero and heroine's first interaction - it's only referenced by them both.
2. Lori is pretty harsh with Reid at times. At first, she only sees him as a pretty-boy all-around-charmer ex-baseball player who gets everything he wants very easily and her opinion changes as Reid himself changes, but ... well people's essentials don't change that much, and in this case, I think Reid's change was believable because he always had that potential there, but just wasn't fully expressing it. Lori was unduly mean in certain scenes, in ways that Reid definitely didn't deserve.
3. I love stories where the heroine is a shy-wallflower-type, but here, that point was stressed a little too much by Lori herself - it got kind of tedious.
4. Something like 30 pages before the end, the book takes a very unhappy twist and it kind of puts a damper on the whole happy-ending thing. Really caught me off guard, too.
5. This is party of Mallery's Buchanan family series and unlike most romance books I've read that are part of a series, the fact that I hadn't read the previous ones left me somewhat at a loss at times. Reid's family is pretty front and center and there often wasn't enough of an introduction to who these people were or what the back story was.
6. As much as I wanted some more context for Reid's family, I thought the book focused way too much on Dani, the Buchanan sister. She's the heroine of the next book, Tempting, but there were huge chunks of pages in this one that were only about her and I was very tempted to skip them.
7. Totally minor, but the scene where Penny (Reid's sister-in-law) says she loves cooking (she's a chef) more than her daughter or her husband really bothered me. I'm not a mother or a wife, but when I become either of those things I hope that I don't love my job more than my children/husband!! And I'm not saying this in a 1950s-sexist-wife thing - my husband better feel the same way, lol.
   

BOTTOM LINE
So yeah ... wasn't a total waste of time, but I still don't know whether or not I'll be giving this author another try. Glad I got the book from the library!