Scan barcode
A review by sandlynn
Thinking About You by Monica Murphy
2.0
Thinking About You by Monica Murphy, published in 2018, is a short novel at 234 pages and appears to be a part of a series of books mostly based on American professional football players from the San Francisco 49ers team.
This current story is based in and around London, England. The 49ers is one of the U.S. football teams invited to London to play a exhibition game at Wembley Stadium. The book opens with some of the team’s players and staff attending a party being thrown by a titled, wealthy Brit. Football player, Cannon Whittaker, feels out of place but decided to attend hoping for some good food and drink. While there he meets an attractive British woman, Lady Susanna Sumner, whose father is an Earl. Despite the titles, Susanna’s family makes their money through finance and Susanna, herself, has a part time job at an art gallery. After some flirtatious conversation between the two, Cannon and Susanna decide to leave the party and continue the celebration on their own which leads to a hot night of sex and days of enjoying each other’s company between the sheets. Even though they are developing feelings for each other beyond the physical, they know a more serious relationship is not in the cards. After all, she lives in London and he lives in California. Furthermore, he’s a working class American whose all about football and she’s a titled woman whose well-to-do family has roots in the British aristocracy.
Although I enjoyed aspects of this novel, I basically found it pretty disjointed and unclear as to what it wanted to be. It started out as a pretty hot erotic romance. About halfway through the book we stay with the heroine as the couple face their inevitable parting, promising to keep in touch. The story then focuses mostly on the heroine, and we get little of what the hero is experiencing in California. In fact, all through the story, I felt like the hero was less well drawn. We learn about his physical appearance, his sexual prowess, and his feeling of intellectual and class inferiority, but most of the plot which susses out character is with the heroine. We see her interact with her best friend and with her family, while the hero is left mostly a blank slate in those areas. However, that did lead to very good section of the book where Susanna visits her family’s home for her parents’ anniversary and all kinds of crap hits the fan, mostly involving her brother and best friend. At that point, the story turned into a bit of a family farce and I was really enjoying the antics. I would’ve liked more of this and only wished the hero could’ve been a part of it in order to learn more about him. After those scenes, an event happens that once again switches the story’s tone to one that’s more of a “dramedy” which leads to a reappearance of the hero and a return to the erotic. As I said, for such a short book, this was all over the place. For that reason and because we really never get to know the hero, which made the ending kind of a blank slate, I would give this book a C-. If the author has written something longer, it might be worth a try — especially if it takes the time to develop both protagonists.
This current story is based in and around London, England. The 49ers is one of the U.S. football teams invited to London to play a exhibition game at Wembley Stadium. The book opens with some of the team’s players and staff attending a party being thrown by a titled, wealthy Brit. Football player, Cannon Whittaker, feels out of place but decided to attend hoping for some good food and drink. While there he meets an attractive British woman, Lady Susanna Sumner, whose father is an Earl. Despite the titles, Susanna’s family makes their money through finance and Susanna, herself, has a part time job at an art gallery. After some flirtatious conversation between the two, Cannon and Susanna decide to leave the party and continue the celebration on their own which leads to a hot night of sex and days of enjoying each other’s company between the sheets. Even though they are developing feelings for each other beyond the physical, they know a more serious relationship is not in the cards. After all, she lives in London and he lives in California. Furthermore, he’s a working class American whose all about football and she’s a titled woman whose well-to-do family has roots in the British aristocracy.
Although I enjoyed aspects of this novel, I basically found it pretty disjointed and unclear as to what it wanted to be. It started out as a pretty hot erotic romance. About halfway through the book we stay with the heroine as the couple face their inevitable parting, promising to keep in touch. The story then focuses mostly on the heroine, and we get little of what the hero is experiencing in California. In fact, all through the story, I felt like the hero was less well drawn. We learn about his physical appearance, his sexual prowess, and his feeling of intellectual and class inferiority, but most of the plot which susses out character is with the heroine. We see her interact with her best friend and with her family, while the hero is left mostly a blank slate in those areas. However, that did lead to very good section of the book where Susanna visits her family’s home for her parents’ anniversary and all kinds of crap hits the fan, mostly involving her brother and best friend. At that point, the story turned into a bit of a family farce and I was really enjoying the antics. I would’ve liked more of this and only wished the hero could’ve been a part of it in order to learn more about him. After those scenes, an event happens that once again switches the story’s tone to one that’s more of a “dramedy” which leads to a reappearance of the hero and a return to the erotic. As I said, for such a short book, this was all over the place. For that reason and because we really never get to know the hero, which made the ending kind of a blank slate, I would give this book a C-. If the author has written something longer, it might be worth a try — especially if it takes the time to develop both protagonists.