My Take In Brief: A sexy and sweet romance with truffle oil, brush fires, and baby wombats!
Cover Comment: Sophie has short pixieish hair. And this cover model…doesn’t.
Audio note: I listened to Burning Up on audio, and while I liked the narrator, Gabra Zackman, who does a lot of Blazes (Mayberry, Jade Lee, Stephanie Bond, etc.), I should warn you that this New York based actor does an Australian accent which would not be very convincing to anyone who has an ear for these things.
Read the first few pages on Mayberry’s website.
Setting: Australia, present day, almost entirely in a mansion in the hills.
Plot: After cooking in her boyfriend’s family restaurant for over a decade, Sophie takes a month long job as personal chef to Lucas Grant, a playboy actor with a knee injury.
Heroine and Hero: Sophie is a very good person whose safe, predictable life gets a shake up when her boyfriend dumps her. Lucas is a famous sexy actor, a charming cad.
Conflict: Lucas’s traumatic childhood prevents him from forming emotional attachments.
Word on the Web:
AAR, Katie Mack, B+
“While the casual-affair-turned-serious plotline isn’t new to series romances by any means, not a lot of authors write this evolution as effectively and enjoyably as Mayberry does.”
Racy Romance Review:
This is my 3rd Blaze by this author and I have yet to be disappointed. I can’t remember the last time I could not put down an audio book, but it happened immediately with this one. Granted, the alternative was grading papers, but I found myself taking the dog for extra walks. I actually tried to listen to it while playing cards with my kids, until they shamed me into turning it off.
Sophie has less of a character arc than Lucas: she begins by getting dumped by her boyfriend who breaks it gently to her that they have not been in love for years, and her journey pretty much ends after the first third of the book, when she faces the fact that her sister’s traumatic death in her teen years has had a big effect on her. Sophie decides to “be crazy”, invents a terrible sounding kind of ravioli with an egg yolk inside, and, in a more promising move, explores the casual affair which Lucas offers her, but oops! She falls in love with him.
The focus for the rest of the book is on Lucas, his inability to face his orphaned childhood, and the barrier this places on his emotional availability to Sophie. There is a lot of sex in this book, even for a Blaze, although since physical intimacy is all Lucas can do, I felt it was appropriate and moved the story forward. Sophie is incredibly good, loving, patient, honest, and strong, and her near perfection might annoy some readers. Lucas is also a very good man but with the one flaw, which leads him to push Sophie away.
This is the 3rd book about a famous movie star I can recall having read, after Susan Elizabeth Phillips’s Breathing Room (just okay) and Julie James’s Just the Sexiest Man Alive (wonderful). Burning Up is a category, of course, but two major differences from those books are (1) the shorter character arc of the heroine and emphasis on the hero, and (2) the stardom of Lucas was not really relevant except to the extent that his fame allowed him access to beautiful women and instrumental relationships, and it made possible a very sweet public declaration of love that only a movie star could have made.
I know this plot has been done and done before, but Mayberry has a way of making things fresh and getting me hooked. I can see the outlines of the journey, but she always surprises me with the exact route. For example, when Lucas and Sophie begin to explore their attraction, Sophie panics and runs off in the middle of a kiss. My prediction was that she would hide in her bedroom until the next morning, and I would be treated to pages upon pages of internal monologue, but I was wrong. To take one more example, I correctly predicted that Lucas would do something to try to hurt Sophie, to create emotional distance, but instead of taking it at face value, Sophie sees his actions for what they are and calls him out for being immature. Finally, I never could have predicted the role that brush fires and baby wombats play in this book. To find out more, you’ll have to read it for yourself!
PS. In the process of writing this review I went over to Amazon to look at SEP’s Breathing Room, and I got sidetracked, as usual, and started reading reviews. One particular review matched my own opinion of the book EXACTLY. Wow! I couldn’t believe it! And then I realized … I wrote it.
Aww I liked this one too, but then I am biased as I am an unabashed Sarah Mayberry fangirl/cheerleader!
I liked that the main emoitional arc in this book was with the male character. I find sometimes in the Blaze line it’s too much about the girls. All about female empowerment and the such and while that isn’t a bad thing I do miss a good male-centric arc at times.
This was my fourth Mayberry and cemented my status as lifelong Mayberry fan. I love how she plays with gender roles with the genre. She did female boxing with Below the Belt and a Male Ballet Dancer in Amorous Liasons. So much more entertaining and interesting than ‘Alpha’ SEAL/SpecOps guy. I even enjoyed the Superromance which is not a line I am normally a fan of.
(Have I done enough cheerleading yet? Can you tell this is a favourite author of mine? *g*)
Anyhoo, I’m so glad you enjoyed it. Vive le Mayberry!
Oooh, I didn’t realize Audible sold Mayberry books. And I’m out of credits. Argh!
One particular review matched my own opinion of the book EXACTLY. Wow! I couldn’t believe it! And then I realized … I wrote it.
ROFLMAO!!!
I like your new review format. I might have to try it for my own – with all due credit, of course.
ReacherFan wrote:
thanks. It’s actually not new, it’s my “formal” review format, as opposed to my “lazy ass” format. I’ve been lazy lately!
Sayuri wrote:
Great point, and so true.
Thanks for the review Jessica. I will have to try this one when I can see over my current TBR pile (such a fire hazard!).
I did really enjoy SEP’s Breathing Room however – it was the first book of hers that I read and I suppose it will remain a favourite for that reason – I really had no idea what I was getting into when I opened it up – it had a “women’s fiction” type cover and I wasn’t expecting it to be a romance which was funny and sexy too. Maybe my pre-conceptions made the book better – who knows? I did really like it though.
Back to Mayberry (and the topic!). I read one of her books earlier and thought it was great – I am Australian and I usually have a bit of a “cultural cringe” about Australian authors and settings but she does it really well. I’ll put this on my list.
I haven’t read the Mayberry book, but I loved Breathing Room, it’s my favorite SEP. Whereas Ain’t She Sweet, which scores half a star higher on Amazon, did absolutely nothing for me.
I love a good Superstar + Commoner story (not to be confused with rich rake + helpless waif story), in fact, I’m planning to write one myself 3 books from now. So maybe I’ll hunt this one down and dissect what I can and should steal and what I can and should avoid..
Of the three books with that plotline, I think the Mayberry is the least dependent on the stardom of the hero. He really could have been anything and the story would have worked. with the James and SEP, I think taking away the stardom would change the book into a different book entirely.
I did like Breathing Room, but I had just read some pretty intense romances from SEP and found the romance in BR pretty watered down and not that central to the goings on. So, in context, it was a disappointment.
I haven’t read Ain’t She Sweet but coincidentally, I picked up a used hardcover copy at my grocery for a buck yesterday!
I read this book a little bit ago. I really liked how Mayberry shows Lucas’ emotional problems through more relationships besides just his romantic relationships (friendships, business). I feel like often times fear of intimacy caused by a traumatic past is used by authors to legitimize or excuse rakish (promiscuous) behavior, especially for men. IMO, it is more personal with Lucas; you really see and feel how deep and damaging his isolation is and the problem becomes more than just a label/trope.