I’m always being asked which novel is my favorite. For goodness’ sake, people, that’s like asking me which of my two children is my favorite! The only possible answer is: the book that isn’t whining at me at the moment – i.e., any novel that’s out of my computer, out of copyedits, out of proofs, and safely on the shelves. I have huge fondness for all my printed heroes and heroines. I miss them, especially the heroines. By the time a book is finished, each of my heroines has become my girlfriend. She talks to me in the middle of the night. She says all the snappy, funny things that I would like to say but never remember in time. She tames her husbands! OK, enough said there.

It’s a lot easier to say which book written by someone else is my favorite. It Had to Be You is my hands-down favorite of Susan Elizabeth Phillips’s books. I adore this novel, from the moment it opens (when Phoebe Somerville’s poodle pees on her father’s coffin) to the moment it closes (when Phoebe realizes that she’s just engaged in an intimate act squarely on the 50-yard line of a huge Sports Dome).

The novel takes place in Chicago, starting when Phoebe has to come back from New York for her father’s funeral. She brings with her a nervous poodle (see above) and a gorgeous Hungarian lover. Everyone is outraged – and that outrage only grows when it turns out that her father has left her his football team, the Chicago Stars. No one is more annoyed that the Stars’ head coach, Dan Calebro. He’s just the sexist, big type of man whom Phoebe loathes, and the feeling is mutual. Dan has been spending his time looking for the perfect wife, and he thinks he’s found her in a sweet-faced kindergarten teacher. He’s got no time to waste on someone like Phoebe, a woman with “a bad girl’s body, the sort of body that…could just as well have been displayed with a staple through the navel as hanging on a museum wall.”

But this novel isn’t a standard Opposites-Attract novel. Both characters have deep and complex personalities, rife with complexities and problems. Phillips unfurls each person with such adroit care, amid flurries of hilarious dialogue, that the reader hardly notices before she’s utterly fascinated by Dan and Phoebe. This is a brilliant, deeply romantic, deeply felt, deeply sexy book. Do not waste a moment if you haven’t read it – you have such a treat in store for you!

~buy this book~