Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Review: Beautiful Player

Title: Beautiful Player
Author: Christina Lauren
Publishing Date: 2013
Genre: Contemporary
Rating: B
Sensuality: Smokin' Hot
Book Disclosure: I purchased an ebook.

Beautiful Player is the third book in Christina Lauren's Beautiful series.  Hanna Bergstrom has been spending too much time in the lab and not enough time being a young twenty something.  Her brother wants to make sure that she has an appropriate balance in her life between school and a social life.  He insists that she call up his best friend Will Sumner since they both live in the city, and meet some people and have fun.  Once upon a time Hanna had a crush on Will, her older brother's bad boy friend.  It's been years since she has seen him and once they start hanging out, it turns out that attraction Hanna had as a teenager is still there, only it's not one-sided any longer.

I really enjoy reading Christina Lauren's books.  Beautiful Player was no exception.  If you have enjoyed other Christina Lauren books, then I think you will enjoy this one too.  In this book, I really liked Hanna.  She is the type of person I could see myself wanting to be friends with and hang out together.  She is very direct and forthright in her behavior.  She is a "what you see is what you get" type of person.  Will finds this very intriguing as he has "dated" a lot of different women and they tended to be more superficial.  He finds Hanna refreshing.  It's obvious from the beginning that Will is attracted to Hanna, but she is clueless about reading the cues.  This leads to some misunderstandings between them.

I would say that much of the relationship between Will and Hanna is driven by their physical attraction to each other.  There is a lot of focus on sex in this book.  The good news is that I felt that the author used the sex scenes to build Will and Hanna's relationship.  But after a while it was like, here we go again.  Fortunately, Christina Lauren uses a lot of dialog to tell the story, rather than mental lusting.  There is some of that going on, but not so much that it detracts from the story.  All in all, I would give this a thumbs up.

3 comments:

Rowena said...

Christina Lauren has been on my radar for some time now but I've never given her a chance. I'm not even sure why since I've heard nothing but good things about her stuff. I need to get some of her books read. Do you need to read the other books in the series first or can I jump right into this one? I'm a sucker for that brother's best friend storyline.

Lover Of Romance said...

I am glad that you ended up liking this one. I tried book one but wasn't a huge fan of it. But I have been thinking about returning to the series though sometime.

Jill D. said...

Hi Rowena - I love Christina Lauren. I first read Sweet Filthy Boy and fell in love with it. I would recommend starting with that one. Or with Beautiful Bastard, the first in the Beautiful series. But if you really want to dive in with this one you can. The other characters show up as friends in the story. Their romances were in the previous books.

LOR - My first was Sweet Filthy Boy. If you want to give her another try, I would recommend that one.