jayvall reviewed What I did for love by Susan Elizabeth Phillips
Review of 'What I did for love' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
Georgie York won America’s heart in a long-running sitcom, where they watched her grow up. Now, as an adult, she’s won the sympathy of America when her movie star husband dumps her for another woman. Everywhere she goes, the paparazzi follow her, documenting the every move of the jilted woman. So when Georgie finds herself married to her least favorite person in the world, her former co-star, she can’t bear to endure another break up in the public’s eye. She convinces Bram to stay married to her, even though neither one of them really has any feelings towards each other. Or do they?
I was late to the Susan Elizabeth Phillips love party, but now that I’ve got a couple of her books under my belt, I see what all the love fest has been about. There’s something about SEP’s characters and storytelling that makes reading her books the only …
Georgie York won America’s heart in a long-running sitcom, where they watched her grow up. Now, as an adult, she’s won the sympathy of America when her movie star husband dumps her for another woman. Everywhere she goes, the paparazzi follow her, documenting the every move of the jilted woman. So when Georgie finds herself married to her least favorite person in the world, her former co-star, she can’t bear to endure another break up in the public’s eye. She convinces Bram to stay married to her, even though neither one of them really has any feelings towards each other. Or do they?
I was late to the Susan Elizabeth Phillips love party, but now that I’ve got a couple of her books under my belt, I see what all the love fest has been about. There’s something about SEP’s characters and storytelling that makes reading her books the only thing in the world that I want to do. I would stay up late reading WHAT I DID FOR LOVE, and I would even sneak in a couple of pages whenever I had some down time at work. Lest you think this was a perfect book, let me assure you, it was not. It was obvious from the first page, if not the blurb, that the character of Georgie York was based on Jennifer Aniston—the wildly successful television show, the humiliatingly public break up. Even as a reader who enjoys roman à clef’s very much, I found such a close adherence to Aniston’s public life as a basis for the character to be distracting. As I would read, I constantly would compare details in the story with details from Aniston’s life. However, this hyper-awareness of Jennifer as Georgie disappeared about one-third of the way into the book. Georgie became her own person in my mind, and I was able to read about her without constantly picturing Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt in my head.
What I like about Phillips’ writing is that her stories are more than genre romance. While much of the story is about the hero and heroine falling in love, it’s not the only thing going on in the book. Instead, Phillips’ works seem more like a full-bodied romance to me. Yes, there’s the main romance, but there’s also a cast of secondary characters that I grow to care about as well. That being said, I did have my reservations about the depth of the romance between Georgie and Bram. While I believe that by the last page, they loved each other, I didn’t really believe in Bram’s big “ah ha” moment. But the fact that I enjoyed nearly everything else about this book made it easier to overlook this particular misstep.
Overall, I enjoyed Susan Elizabeth Phillips’ latest effort, and I enjoyed the cameos of characters from previous books. I’m not only looking forward to her next book, but I’m glad I have most of her backlist to get through, too.
Originally posted on Romance Reader at Heart