Beverly Brandt

A light-hearted chicklit that neither strains your brain nor insults your intelligence.

Sure, they Meet Cute (she’s wearing a fish costume and about the be struck down by a runaway gelato cart), sparks fly, there’s The Misunderstanding (she’s misinformed about his sexual orientation), the Slow Build (complicated by The Misunderstanding), followed by the Big Reveal, the Hot Monkey Sex, and The Menace to It All, which has to be defeated before the Happy Ever After.

That’s all formulaic show more stuff, but Brandt’s light hand and a heroine who’s not a ditz – a little klutzy, yes, and a bit slow on the uptake, lift this one above the average for the genre.

Heroine Savannah Taylor is a bit of an anal-compulsive, planning her wedding to Mr. Obviously Not Right with the care and precision of a Moon shot, only to have her big day ruined by a pesky arrest warrant ending in cuffs around the wrist rather than a ring on the finger. It gets cleared up – her identity has been stolen, and those unpaid bills and questionable financial dealings aren’t hers at all – but not until Mr. ONR has decided she’s too much trouble for wife material. She decides the answer to her broken heart and oh-so-boring accountant job is to take off for Florida and run down the woman who stole her identity and ruined her life, and maybe kick up her heels a bit along the way.

To support herself while she’s chasing down her nemesis, Savannah takes a number of unsatisfying jobs (see fish costume, above), rents a room in a sleepy motel suddenly overrun with spring-break college students, and ultimately goes back to boring old accounting where – in a roaring coincidence that actually turns out to be less coincidental than one might think – she finds her identity thief, which is when things begin to get way too real for comfort.

Okay, the ending doesn’t bear a whole lot of real close examination. What do you want – great literature?

Just crank up the tunes, slather on some sunscreen, pour yourself an umbrella drink, and enjoy. show less

Bradley Nelson is an aspiring country singer who's just been dumped (literally--out of her tour bus in Reno) by his girlfriend who, unfortunately, is also related to the owner of his record label.

He's just started talking to a woman in a gorilla suit outside the casino where his mom works when his mom drives up in her Winnebago, and men with guns come out of the casino, so he grabs the woman in the gorilla suit and they jump in the Winnebago and all drive off with the mobsters in hot show more pursuit.

It only gets more complicated after that.

Turns out Mrs. Nelson has just stolen $3,000,000 that she's determined the casino owes the IRS, and she's planning on turning the money over to her old supervisor at the IRS.

Delphine Armstrong is the woman in the gorilla suit. She's caught up in the adventure, now that the mobsters--and her boss--think that she's assisted Mrs. Nelson in the theft. But as time goes on, Delphine doesn't want to get away. She falls in love with both Bradley and his mom, and comes up with better and better stories to get them to let her stay with them.

It's reminiscent of both Housesitter and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, which is a good thing, because I loved both of those movies.

Delphine, like Gwen in Housesitter, despite her tall tales and her floundering career-wise, does know who she is. It's a lovely angle that Bradley, who's so sure of his goals, who's trying to be something he's not, and that's the source of his lack of success.

As in all the best romances, both Delphine and Bradley need something from each other, and they complement each other perfectly. The backdrop of madcap adventure and excitement just highlights it all and makes the story more fun.

I'd love to see this as a movie--over-the-top, fun, car chases with a Winnebago, the gorilla suit, and of course the romance and the music--cinematic gold.

By the way, this is connected to Record Time (#6), though I didn't realize that until I started checking out the reviews. Bradley's ex-girlfriend is the sister of Kylie, the heroine from Record Time. It makes no difference to enjoying this story, by the way--it's not a typical sequel. No gratuitous scenes of the previous couple in their wedded bliss with half a dozen offspring, in other words. show less

It's a fairly standard romance plot--ugly duckling heroine and the wealthy businessman with emotional issues hero--but Beverly Brandt makes it sparkle. Kylie is a well-meaning disaster coming close to, but not falling into slapstick, and David has a horror of being made a laughingstock--a result that seems guaranteed if he's around Kylie for any length of time. The plots around the homeless alcoholic brother and loud obnoxious mother could have easily become cliches, but didn't. As I've come show more to expect from this author, there are laughs that are underlined with seriousness. A wonderful read. show less

I knew I was going to like this one. Interesting, though--it's not easy to like a protagonist who's depressed, and Daphne is depressed, cutting herself off from emotions and life after 9/11--she's a former FBI agent & feels guilty for not preventing it. Overlapping, interwoven plot threads have Daphne following a woman whose boyfriend suspects her of infidelity to a business called Rules of Engagement, a counseling service that claims to show women how to get the men in their lives to show more propose. She meets the son of the owner and breaks all the rules, and a simple, boring assignment turns into an investigation of murder, possible terrorism, and leads her to a man who can understand and help her heal. Dense, emotional, exciting--all things I've come to expect from this author. show less