{"id":1879,"date":"2012-12-19T08:00:27","date_gmt":"2012-12-19T14:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/?p=1879"},"modified":"2012-12-04T14:58:20","modified_gmt":"2012-12-04T20:58:20","slug":"book-review-the-great-escape","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/?p=1879","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: The Great Escape"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/d.gr-assets.com\/books\/1333197940l\/12749982.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"223\" height=\"331\" \/>In this sequel to &#8220;Call Me Irresistible,&#8221; we discover what happened to Lucy after running away from her wedding to Ted. I had a lot of fun with Ted and Meg, and was looking forward to following Lucy&#8217;s adventure.<\/p>\n<p>Lucy and Ted weren&#8217;t right for one another. That was well established in the prequel, and I continued to understand it in this novel. Lucy felt pressured into the match as she tried to live up to high expectation she had dealt with her entire life. I even though I understood why she got on the back of Panda&#8217;s motorcycle and went on a joyride with him for a while. I wasn&#8217;t sure why she stayed with him for the next two weeks, and then, when he ditched her at the airport, I REALLY didn&#8217;t understand why she looked him up, went to his home, and discovering he wasn&#8217;t it, broke in and started living there.<\/p>\n<p>There was a lot to like about this book. Ultimately, I did buy into the comparability of the two main characters, but I didn&#8217;t buy into the early chemistry or the reasons that they even spent time together. There were a couple of secondary stories, one of which I found compelling &#8212; the Jillian Michaels type woman, host of a sensationalist weight loss program, hiring Panda to help her lose weight was really very well done. Best part of the book, IMO.<\/p>\n<p>I liked that the characters had issues, and had to deal with them. (Both primary and secondary.) But in the end, I did not enjoy the reading of this story nearly as much as I enjoyed &#8220;Call Me Irresistible.&#8221; That one was fun, sassy, and the chemistry was there from the start. This one was more sober, serious, and I had trouble buying into the chemistry at first. Two different approaches by the same author &#8212; which I can respect. Some will like the first approach more, some the second. I tend to read romance for entertainment value more than anything else, so while I appreciated what she did in this book, I liked the other one better.<\/p>\n<p>Whichever way you prefer it, serious or sassy, Susan Elizabeth Phillips is a talented romance writer, and I recommend many of her books, including this one.<\/p>\n<p>Rating: 3\/5<\/p>\n<p>Title: The Great Escape<\/p>\n<p>Author: Susan Elizabeth Phillips<\/p>\n<p>ISBN:\u00a00062106100<\/p>\n<p>Published July 10, 2012<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In this sequel to &#8220;Call Me Irresistible,&#8221; we discover what happened to Lucy after running away from her wedding to Ted. I had a lot of fun with Ted and Meg, and was looking forward to following Lucy&#8217;s adventure. Lucy and Ted weren&#8217;t right for one another. That was well established in the prequel, and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-what-im-reading","category-romance-what-im-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1879"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1879\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1880,"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1879\/revisions\/1880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}