Dance Away with Me

First and foremost: if this is your first SEP book, stop and don\’t read this one. It is not at all representative of her awesomeness. Start with It Had to Be You or Ain\’t She Sweet or almost any other one. This one, Dance Away with Me, will make you never try her again and that would be tragic. SEP is a great author, I\’ve loved almost all her books but this one is a great big fail and so unlike her that I have to wonder if she actually wrote it. It is lacking in SEP\’s usual charm, humor and chemistry. The whole plot is so implausible (can\’t even tell you how many legalities and real-world issues are overlooked in the whole Wren situation) that the only way one could overlook that is if the characters are compelling: they are not. The heroine is an odiously self-righteous preachy person I truly did not like, the Hero is fine but the whole \”I can\’t love\” thing was just incongruous and immature for a character who otherwise acts like an adult. I could even overlook the annoying heroine but there was no chemistry at all. And I was surprised to find her thinking that she loved the Hero: how had that happened? They have nothing in common and don\’t even seem to have lust — though we are TOLD there is lust, I did not feel it. The townspeople are almost all of them quite unpleasant, humorless and downright nasty with no redeeming qualities. I didn\’t enjoy reading about this little town and kept wondering why the heroine would want to stay there. SEP usually has a second plot/thread that runs simultaneously with the main story. Not in this book. Or, rather, I should say that the secondary thread in this book is so thin as to be embarrassing. Seriously, it is just meh and adds NOTHING to the main plot. Finally, no matter what your politics and beliefs are about what social policy should be, it is is always jarring to find the author\’s views playing a major role in the story. Even if you agree with the point of view being expressed. It sounded preachy and self-righteous and just annoyed me. Part of the reason I read romance novels is to get away from exactly this. It was so so disappointing to find almost every page drenched in views about sex ed. Not to mention the heroine\’s refusing to sell cigarettes, etc. Ugh. It felt like being hit repeatedly over the head with a 2×4. This book was a terrible disappointment. I had really hoped it would cheer me up at a time when I had been longing for an escape. I recommend running from this one.

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.

Couldn\’t get past page 39, at which point I flung it in the trash can. Ms. Phillips\’ FB page is already preachy and agenda-pushing but I thought her book might be less obviously nagging and woke-scoldy. If the book is already dripping with smug self-righteous messaging less than 50 pages in, forget about it. Life is too short to put up with finger-wagging from a beach-read.

This book wasn’t terrible, I read it in a day so there’s that. But it lacked the humor that I expect from SEP’s books. It started out with depressed main characters and stayed that way, for the most part. It dealt with lots of heavy subject matter (grief, death, abuse, teen pregnancy) & the character development felt a bit shallow. I normally love Ms. Phillips’ stories, & I understand she wanted to tackle some meatier issues, but I have come to expect her books to at least have a couple of quirky, amusing characters and those were sadly lacking in this darker story. I hope it’s not a permanent change in her writing style. I could’ve used the laughs I expected this book to provide.

It took me nearly a week to get to 30% on my ereader. Such a disappointment. Perhaps the author has evolved – not the type of books I want to read. I\’ve asked Amazon for a refund. Where is the author I loved so much?

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