Heartbreakingly Awful (This Heart of Mine - Susan Elizabeth Phillips)

Member Name: Brooke3

Product:	This Heart of Mine - Susan Elizabeth Phillips
Date:	28/03/09 (173 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: the story with Lilly and Liam

Disadvantages: the rest of the book

-Plot-
Molly is the writer of children's books and the sister of Phoebe, the owner of a big American football team. Kevin is the teams star player. Molly has had a crush on Kevin for years but he doesn't even notice and although they've been introducted many times he can't even remember her name.
One weekend they are both coincidently in Phoebe's holiday home. Kevin still shows no sign of being interested in Molly but one night while he's sleeping she climbs into bed with him, puts a condom that she found in his shaving kit on him and has sex with him while he's sleeping. The condom breaks, Molly is pregnant and Kevin marries her out of some kind of nobility.

On the day of their wedding Molly loses the baby and the two part ways. Molly becomes very depressed. She misses an appointment with the attorney and Kevin goes to her apartment to see why. When he finds her in such a bad state he takes her to the camp that his parents left him in their will. There Molly begins the road to recovery and their love story begins.

-Opinion-
You will have guessed by my star rating that I didn't like this book and I could write a 2,000 word essay on why but as that will likely bore you all I will keep this as concise as I can.

Let's start with the plot. I think my synopsis says it all. Girl meets boy, boy isn't interested in girl so girl sexually assaults him while he sleeps, something that he is quick to point out after the incident but conveniently gets over later in the book. I've read many a romance novel where the woman is sexually assaulted or raped and it's considered romantic so I don't know why it surprises me in this book when it's the man being assaulted. I would say that it's a double standard but it's really not because it happens so often to women in some of these novels.
I just personally didn't feel that this was a very good basis for a romantic relationship or for a romance novel. Although both characters seem to get over it as a reader I couldn't.

Then there's the characters.
Molly is the heroine of the novel and I can't remember the last time I read a book where I disliked the heroine so much. Let's put aside the fact that she sexually assault Kevin because that is just one of the many things that make her an intensely unlikeable character.
She is a xenophobe. Throughout the book she uses foreign woman (she's American) and bimbo interchangeably. She basically has an issue with the fact that Kevin dates so many foreign women and often suggests that he dates women who aren't American because he likes women who are stupid and inferior to him. Maybe I got offended because I'm not American (nor am I stupid or a bimbo). Regardless of my own nationality I just don't think that good heroines are so prejudiced, at least not if you want a reader to actually like them.

Phillips tries to portray Molly as being really altruistic-she's an heiress who gave all of her money to disadvantaged children, she is a much loved aunt who spoils her nieces and nephews, she is a part time vegetarian who uses humane mouse traps...which is all very nice but if you want a nice character who people will like first of all don't make her a sex offender, secondly don't make her a xenophobe and thirdly if she's going to be a vegetarian make it so that she doesn't eat any meat, instead of someone who only eats animals that aren't cute. The whole thing of her only eating animals that aren't cute made her appear to be extremely shallow.

Molly is a character with no backbone and with very little strength who seems to pick and choose when she has principles and those principles may or may not be consistent depending on her mood.

Kevin is her husband and while he is a pretty decent character the whole thing feels forced. I could never quite believe that he would feel any obligation towards Molly after what she did to him. Phillips tries to give him some kind of depth and make him more than just a stupid football player but it seems like she tries too hard and in the end just makes it all seemed forced and unreal.

There are some other really interesting characters, particularly Lilly and Liam but unfortunately their part of the book is brief and under developed. While Lilly is brought to life on the pages of this book and you begin to feel a real empathy for her (shame she's not the main character in this book) with Liam you're left feeling like you need to know more.

Another issue that I had with the book is that Phillips seems to be trying to make a stand against homophobia (that in itself is a good thing of course) but she doesn't have a single non-straight character in the book, or at least not one that we know isn't straight. There's an anti-gay group who are trying to make Molly revise her books because two of the animals in it who are both female are standing too close together. Phillips really shows how ridiculous these groups can be and in a way makes a good statement against these kinds of groups, although it's never clear if that statement is also against homophobia. It just seemed to me that a better way to make this kind of statement is to actually include a gay character.

There were a few redeeming features of this book. The romance between Kevin and Molly is actually pretty good in parts, although dragged out unnecessarily. If it wasn't for the beginning of this book and what went on between the two of them I might have even enjoyed it, although it still would have been at best an average romance novel.

I enjoyed the love story between Liam and Lilly. They're both characters who actually have some depth and intrigue and I found the interaction between them to be very heart warming. Unfortunately not much time is spent on their story and as such part of the development has to be assumed rather than read. You expect this with secondary plots but because this story was so much better than the main one I wanted to read more.

This book is part of a series but you really don't need to read the others to read this one (I've read one of the previous books but not all of them and really they read as standalones because apart from the football team they don't seem to have anything else in common).
Even though you can read this as a standalone I wouldn't bother.

Summary: Don't waste your time