
Breathing Room by Susan Elizabeth Phillips is a romance novel set in Italy, where a career woman, Dr. Isabel Favor, seeks refuge after losing everything. There, she meets Lorenzo Ren Gage, a famous actor known for playing villains. The two characters have a slow-building, humorous, and steamy romance while getting entangled in local mysteries and dealing with personal insecurities. The book explores themes of self-discovery, love, and redemption against the backdrop of the charming Italian setting.
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Sensitive Topics/Content Warnings
Content warnings include themes of betrayal, mental health struggles, and some emotional distress tied to the characters' backstories.
Has Romance?
Yes, Breathing Room features a prominent and evolving romance between the main characters.
From The Publisher:
Join the New York Times bestselling author on a journey to the sun-washed hills of Tuscany. Another sexy, wonderful, contemporary love story with all the heart, wisdom, and wit that have made Susan Elizabeth Phillips the gold standard for women's fiction.
Dr. Isabel Favor, author of Four Cornerstones for a Favorable Life, has sacrificed everything to build her self-help empire. Then, in a matter of weeks, it all comes crashing down. She loses her money to an unscrupulous accountant, her fiancé to a frumpy older woman, and her reputation to headlines denouncing her as a fraud. America's diva of self-help soon discovers she can fix everyone's life but her own. Broke, heartsick, and soul-weary, she heads for Italy in search of a little breathing room.
Lorenzo Gage makes his living killing people... on the silver screen, that is. He's viciously handsome and sublimely talented. But as he begins his vacation in Italy, he's also vaguely dissatisfied. Being a villain with a face to die for has its rewards, but he hates the feeling that everything he's neglected in life is catching up with him. Then he spots Isabel sipping a glass of wine in a sidewalk café. A good guy wouldn't think of seducing such a tidy-looking woman... but he'd never seen the fun in playing the hero.
It doesn't take long for Isabel to realize she's escaped one kind of chaos only to be plunged into another. Even the shelter of a simple stone farmhouse nestled in a Tuscan olive grove can't provide her with the refuge she needs-not when the townspeople are scheming to drive her away, and her plan to restore her reputation has come up empty. And especially not when the man who deceived her refuses to leave her in peace.
Breathing Room is a book for any woman who's dreamed of wandering through a vineyard, of lazing under the Tuscan sky, or of reforming a deliciously wicked man. This is a story of hope and renewal, of love and redemption when it's needed the most. Sometimes it takes a special place... a special love... a little breathing room... for life to deliver all its glorious promise.
Ratings (4)
Loved It (1) | |
Liked It (1) | |
It Was OK (1) | |
Did Not Like (1) |
Reader Stats (8):
Read It (5) | |
Want To Read (1) | |
Did Not Finish (1) | |
Not Interested (1) |
1 comment(s)
I was all on-board with this until the last... 20% or so. Then, the hero seriously pissed me off, and the book went super weird.
This is my first SEP book, though I've heard a lot about her... is this normal?
When Ren
flew in a woman that he could grope and make out with in front of Isabel, I was pretty done with him. That's spineless. If you want to end it, then end it. But he hadn't said a word to her about ending anything... and then he does this? That's appalling bullshit right there. Isabel knew what he was doing, and called him a coward. And frankly, I think she should have kicked him to the curb right then.
I was happy with her reactions though. She was sad, and then she got angry. And anger is what finally let her break down all these barricades she'd erected around herself, to keep her life and her self controlled. I was down with all this, right up through the firey dress, the wild hair, the crackling anger at the party. She was wholly herself, rather than this statue of herself - which is what she is in her normal life, it felt like - and she made it clear that in her opinion the hero could go fuck himself. In fact, she pretty much says that to him.
And then things got super weird. Isabel starts hearing voices, and she becomes a complete lunatic. Grabbing the treasured statue, dashing off in the hero's car, trashing the village and people's property as she speeds through... up to ruins where she stands on a crumbling wall and apparently summons a thunderstorm. With - from the perspective of viewers - lightning flashing right from her hands. She becomes some crazy, property-destroying storm goddess. Ren decides he loves her, they have sex with the magic baby-making statue, and shortly thereafter, all is forgiven.
... the fuck?
Okay, first of all, let me say, I love PNR and UF, and read a lot of it. So I don't inherently have a problem with supernatural elements in storytelling. But this was ... SO out of left field, in this world that is very grounded not just in reality, but in this righteous heroine who breaks into prayer to God multiple times per day. (As an aside, there was a lot of God talk in this book ... way more than I'm interested in, particularly while reading romance. And all that God talk made this ending feel especially weird.)
All-in-all, between the hero crossing a really shitty line and the heroine going off the deep end, the end of this book seemed to go entirely off the rails.
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