Getting Your Hands on Breathing Room by Susan Elizabeth Phillips
Susan Elizabeth Phillips writes romance novels that actually make sense, and Breathing Room is one of her better ones. It follows Kate and Matt, two people who keep running into each other and eventually figure out they like each other. The book has been out since 1999, so finding a copy shouldn't be some desperate hunt. Here's the thing most people miss when looking for this book. You don't need to scour shady download sites or pay inflated prices on Amazon Marketplace. The paperback and hardcover editions are widely available through regular channels, and the audiobook version narrated by Grover Gardner and Kaleo Gray is genuinely good if you want to listen instead. I spent about forty-five minutes looking for a clean PDF of this book a couple years back when I couldn't find a used copy at my local used bookstore. Didn't end well for me. The file was corrupted, missing chapters, and the PDF itself had weird character encoding issues that made half the dialogue unreadable. I ended up just buying the Kindle edition for $4.99 and moving on with my life. That's what you should do.
The book itself runs about 384 pages in paperback. It's a Sunsation novel, which was Phillips' line for romances with a slightly older demographic and more focus on career and emotional depth alongside the romance. If you've read her work before, you'll know exactly what that means. If you haven't, this is a solid entry point. Kate is a landscape architect dealing with a family situation, and Matt owns a restaurant. They have history. The conflict is reasonable. It doesn't rely on the usual misunderstanding tropes that make romance novels frustrating to read. One thing people don't usually mention about this book is how Phillips handles the pacing. Most romance novels of this era rush the midpoint resolution. Breathing Room actually lets the tension sit. There's a scene in the middle where Kate and Matt are stuck in Matt's apartment during a rainstorm and neither one of them makes a move, and instead of dragging it out for filler pages, Phillips just writes it honestly. They're both hesitant. They're both overcomplicating things. It took me three reads to really appreciate how efficient that section is. If you're trying to build a collection of Phillips' work, the ISBN for the Ballantine Books paperback is 0345426167. That's the edition most people own. The ebook version carries its own ISBN and the audiobook is published by Brilliance Audio. Don't bother with the older Signet editions if you can help it. The typesetting is cramped and the margins are annoying.
I also want to mention that Phillips passed away in 2024, so any new printings are posthumous. The quality has stayed consistent across reprints, which is more than I can say for a lot of authors whose estates get handed off to different publishers. Ballantine has kept her backlist reasonably well-maintained. Reading order matters less for this one than some of her other books since it's largely standalone, but if you want context, it exists in the Sunsation universe. A few of her other characters make passing appearances. It's not required reading to understand the plot, but it adds something if you've already read Sugar Daddy or Pretty Mess. The book is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, BookShop.org, and most library systems through Libby if you have a card. I'd recommend the library route first. It's free, and you can return it when you're done instead of adding another physical book to your shelf that you'll probably read once and never touch again.
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