I Need Me More S.E.P.

I hope all the moms out there had a wonderful Mother’s Day. I know I sure did. You see, my iron broke—what a Mother’s Day treat that was!

Wow, I’ve been lucky in the book-reading department lately. First, Gemma Halliday’s SPYING IN HIGH HEELS, then Augusten Burroughs’ RUNNING WITH SCISSORS, and now Susan Elizabeth Phillips’ MATCH ME IF YOU CAN. I finished MATCH last week. Like the aforementioned Halliday and Burroughs, I loved it. But then I love nearly everything S.E.P. writes, so it’s not a surprise that MATCH ME IF YOU CAN fell into that category. But there’s something about this novel that puts it in my “Fav S.E.P.s” category. Here’s a blippy (taken from S.E.P.’s website, it’s not exactly the same as the back cover blurb on the mass market paperback, but I can cut and paste it, and I can’t cut and paste the back of the paperback):

You met star quarterback Kevin Tucker in This Heart of Mine. Now get ready to meet his shark of an agent, Heath Champion, and Annabelle Granger, the girl least likely to succeed. But that’s going to change now that Annabelle’s taken over her late grandmother’s matchmaking business. Why does the wealthy, driven, and gorgeous sports agent Heath Champion need a matchmaker, especially a red-haired screw-up like Annabelle Granger? When the determined Matchmaker promised she’d do anything to keep her star client happy . . . did she mean anything? If Annabelle isn’t careful, she just might find herself going heart-to-heart with the toughest negotiator in town.

A cute-sounding story, right? Also fun and uplifting, which does my heart good on a Sunday afternoon. MATCH ME IF YOU CAN is Book #6 in S.E.P.’s Chicago Stars (that’s a football team) series. Athlete stories are supposed to be hard sells in romance, but for S.E.P. they work because of her characterization. Her heroines are often screw-ups, but they persevere and come out victorious. I think I identify with them (well, except for the big-busted ones), because I am a self-acknowledged screw-up and also persevere (and am waiting for my multitudinous victories, which can happen any time now, thank you very much!). Annabelle Granger in MATCH ME IF YOU CAN is such a heroine. But what I really love about this book is how, although it’s marked as a Stars book, it really has nothing to do with football and yet it reintroduces the reader to characters we’ve come to know and love in previous Chicago Star stories—Phoebe and Dan from IT HAD TO BE YOU, and Kevin and Molly from THIS HEART OF MINE (one of my absolute all-time fav S.E.P.s). There’s something comforting about becoming reacquainted with fav characters from my reading past. I can already see several future S.E.P. heroes and heroines in the making…as the children and teenagers in MATCH ME IF YOU CAN grow up to become the heroes and heroines of their own books (if Phillips chooses to write that long). Oh, yeah, Phillips claims that NATURAL BORN CHARMER, her next book after MATCH (that I really need to buy), is the last of the Chicago Stars series, but we’ll see. As long as her secondary characters keep cropping up in books of their own, I don’t necessarily need football to accompany them—I don’t even like football!

Much as I enjoyed this book, DREAM A LITTLE DREAM is still my #1, All-Time Favorite S.E.P. I loved how it was a little darker than her standard fare. Are you an S.E.P. fan? Which of her books are your favs?