“Can’t Stand the Heat” by Shelly Ellis
c.2013, Kensington Dafina $15.00 296 pages
Sometimes your entire life feels like a recipe for drama. You hate it and you’d like to wipe your plate clean of it all, but that’s never gonna happen. No matter what’s cooking around you, there’s always extra ingredients to increase the tension: raw emotion, sliced egos, boiling tempers, a teaspoon of tears, a pinch of regret and two or three cups of family.
It’s a daily dish you wish you didn’t have to serve and you’re not alone. In the new book “Can’t Stand the Heat” by Shelly Ellis, drama causes quite a stir.
The Gibbons family rules, passed down from Grandma Althea and now enforced by Mama Yolanda, included embodying grace and glamour, always; being the image of perfection, especially to men; not going after someone your sister called dibs on; having a second-stringer in the works before you leave a man; and being sure you take everything you can on your way out.
All the Gibbons girls followed the rules – except Lauren.
Lauren had played along. She took money and gifts from James for months but once he started acting like he owned her, she knew she had to leave him. On the night he beat her almost unconscious, she finally did. And she’d never been happier.
Her raggedy little apartment was no mansion but it was hers. When she was with James, all she did was shop, but now all she did was work and her job as sous chef at Le Bayou Bleu made her heart sing. Best of all, she wasn’t beholden to any man. She was flat broke but she’d die before she’d take anything from a man again.
And then she met Cris.
He was a retired NFL player, handsome and smart, and though he heard rumors around town about “those Gibbons girls,” he believed Lauren when she said she wasn’t like her sisters. He actually stood up for her once so, though she guarded her feelings close, she began to believe that Cris wasn’t like other men who just wanted one thing from her.
And he wasn’t – but someone else was. Someone who thought Lauren was his property, who figured he practically owned her.
Someone who vowed that he’d never give her up without a fight…
Looking for something lightly romantic but with a touch of spice? Then “Can’t Stand the Heat” should be at the top of the menu. Like any good book cook, Ellis changes up the standard boy-meets-girl recipe by adding in a bit of comedic drama in the form of four gold-digging women who stop at nothing to fleece their men.
As the first novel in a new series, this book is perfect for a vacation, beach or weekend read and will make you hungry for the next installment. If “Can’t Stand the Heat” sounds tasty to you, then dish it up quick.
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The Bookworm is Terri Schlichenmeyer. Terri has been reading since she was 3 years old and never goes anywhere without a book. She lives on a hill in Wisconsin with two dogs and 12,000 books. Her self-syndicated book reviews appear in more than 260 newspapers.
