Ain't She Sweet?

by Susan Elizabeth Phillips, 383 pages

Four years after swearing she'd left it behind forever, former spoiled little rich girl Sugar Beth Carey returns to her hometown, where she is given anything but a warm welcome. The animosity, the reader learns, is deserved, but the woman on the receiving end isn't the person she once was. Will she be able to make amends and find acceptance, or will her past crimes remain unforgiven and spoil her future, as well?

Romance is not my genre of choice (although I do read a lot of books with romance as a theme), so my experience with it is pretty limited. I like a little more realism and messiness to my fictional relationships than is standard for the romance formula, and in that regard Phillips delivers. While the characters are still paragons of one sort or another, it's more a case of the two in the principal relationship seeing each other that way than of their actually being "perfect". They say and do awful, thoughtless, yet understandable things, realize and regret them, and then set about fixing what's broken, resulting in some believable emotional drama. Also, Phillips is funny and arms her characters with smart-aleck remarks and amusingly human foibles. They may be prone to "more" (money, gumption, good looks, luck) than your average real human being, but they carry it well enough (and with enough stumbling on the way) to make you not worry about the disconnect too much. And while the happy conclusion may wrap up a little too nicely, isn't that kinda what you read a romance-romance for?