sarah mayberry is a must-read, must-buy author for me. i love, love her novels. but she hasn't published much recently, which made me sad. luckily the wait is over, and tanner is the delightful start to the american extreme bull riders tour book series. every novel in the series takes on one of the bull riders, each book authored by someone different as a standalone.

tanner opens with evie forrester's arrival in kansas in order to surprise her longtime crush-possible boyfriend troy, a bull rider on the tour circuit. she runs into tanner harding first, and he protects her from the humiliation of catching troy with some other girl. but since she bought nonrefundable tickets and planned to stay with troy and liquidated her savings to get to the states from australia, she's kind of stuck. when tanner realizes the dire straits she's in, he swoops in with a helping hand.

he's kind to her. and evie can't help but wonder why. but he makes no demands of her, even though evie is startled to realize that she wouldn't be opposed to any demands coming from him. he's actually super dreamy. when the sexual tension blows up between them and they fall into bed, evie and tanner are happy to enjoy the unexpected fling.

but when tanner is injured and learns that he may never play again, evie steps up in a big way to help him through it. helping him retreat to his colorado ranch, she gets a glimpse of what life could be like with this amazing man. but her life needs to go through melbourne. she is on the last year of completing her veterinary degree and transferring at this stage would put her behind for years. tanner knows he can't ask evie to stay, even though he wants to. at the same time, how can he let her go, when the two weeks that they've spent together have saved him from losing everything.

there's a simple enough solution, and they do eventually see it. and their journey to that moment is utterly enjoyable. i'm glad sarah mayberry is back.

4.5 Stars

Review coming soon (Going up this weekend! )

To be honest, I wasn't sure about the whole bull riding thing at first. But I told myself, this is Sarah, she's not going to disappoint you. And of course, she didn't. She knows how to get readers emotionally. Waiting impatiently for her next book.

I really enjoyed this book. It starts off with a typical romance trope - girl finds out that the guy she’s in love with is cheating on her. Evie Forrester is a student to become a vet in Australia. She travels all the way to Tulsa, Oklahoma to surprise the guy she’s had a crush on since she was a teenager and finally had had a hook-up with him. He’s a bull rider competing on the bull-riding tour. She’s deceived herself to believe that he feels the same. Big surprise - he doesn’t. As she’s trying to figure out what to do with herself in a strange country. She’s rescued by a hot, former national champion bull rider, Tanner Harding. He just can’t stop himself from helping her out.

Needless to say, Tanner and Evie are soon very attracted to each other and things are proceeding as one expects in a standard romance novel. But what makes the book different is that Tanner’s eye is injured after riding a bull and has to cope with being helpless and the loss of his career. Evie is determined to help him get past the first weeks of his recovery. He doesn’t want to accept her help, but has to acknowledge how she is special to him and figure out how to have a romance with a woman who has a life on another continent.

The relationship between the two builds quickly, but believably. Both protagonists are very likable and I enjoyed their interactions. Altogether this helped raise above the standard romance story.

Sometimes planning to surprise someone can end up with you being the one that's surprised. That's certainly what happened when Evie Forrester flew from Australia to unexpectedly visit heBull riding boyfriend! After being rescued by Tanner Harding from interrupting her boyfriend with a buckle bunny, she has to ditch her original plans and accept that her teen crush is just that and their one night stand was truly a one night only. Now she has to sort out what to do till she can fly home me again...... That's where Tanner keeps on proving to be a gentleman and a knight for her. As the two get closer, their mutual attraction builds. It is when Tanner is the one in need of help that she proves she can be just as stubborn as him!

This is a story of teen dreams crashing and burning but the Phoenix of true love rising from the ashes of disaster. It is a great start to a new series and has a range of brilliantly portrayed characters as well as an engaging plot. I enjoyed escaping into this story and will definitely look out for more in the series and more by this talented author in future.

I was gifted a copy of this book via NetGalley and chose to read and review it. This is my honest opinion after reading it.

I thought this story had a very solid writing style and very good indirect characterization… until a point. I loved the first part of this book, when the main characters are beginning to know each other in awkward circumstances - and Sarah Mayberry really writes these initial interactions superbly. I thought the heroine’s crush on another man was well solved, with a quite effective shock treatment. Tanner’s attitude in that part really defines him for the rest of the story: honorable, dependable, honest. And the way their romance started was quite original, I laughed several times. The author creates comic moments stemming from rather embarrassing situations.
Things didn’t go so well for me in the second part, where the author resorts to telling more than showing the attraction between the main characters. There are a lot of sex scenes which don’t add much to the plot, I’ve just skipped them. I was even a bit surprised that Tanner was having sex immediately after his severe injury and a long travel – but, well, I’m not a doctor. I felt that things were a bit rushed and I was a bit disappointed but, all in all, I’ve enjoyed the story and really liked the characters.

I almost always enjoy Sarah Mayberry's books and I enjoyed this book as well.

Our heroine, Evie, is a young and sweet veterinary student. She is a little on the naive side, but not slap worthy. Evie is likable and easy to empathized with. She is somewhat pragmatic despite still wanting to believe in happily ever after. I really liked that she recognized early on in the book that the relationship she had with her childhood friend would never play out the way she had always fantasized it would. Childhood crushes rarely survive the realities of being an adult and it would have been painful and tedious to go through the seven stages of grief for the death of her crush in this book.

Tanner, Evie's love interest, is just an all around good guy and I liked him from the start. He is very much a stand-up guy. He is emotionally honest while still maintaining a stoic cowboy vibe. He is dealing with his own issues through out much of the book but is still enough of a grown up to treat Evie in a respectful and kind way.

There is a fair amount of bull riding action in the book, which I skipped because I always skip detailed action sequences, but I'm sure this would be enjoyable and add credibility to the story for those who enjoy such things.

I found Evie and Tanner's relationship believable and worthy of an HEA (which is always nice in a romance).

I would recommend this book to any fans of Sarah Mayberry or contemporary romance.

A realistic depiction of bull riders and the thrill, not to mention danger of the sport. The author carefully crafted a bull rider in Tanner who embodies the true concept of the riders and the pure physical strength, as well as character that literally leaps off the page in its realism.

Tanner and Evie are a couple that will not be easy to forget. Their chemistry, his tenderness, and her vivacious are so completely captivating...driving the story, keeping me immersed within their story.

Since this was the first book in the series, I look forward to reading the other stories as they are introduced.

This ARC book was provided by the Publisher and Netgally, I am voluntarily providing my honest review.

Unknowingly setting herself up for heartbreak when she empties her savings and hops on a flight on the off-chance that the one-night stand with a man she’d known all her life wants her as badly as she wants him, Evie Forrester’s trip to America suddenly seems like a wasted one when it’s clear that Troy Jensen has moved on fully and wholly from her. Her only saving grace is Tanner Harding, another bull rider whose white knight complex insists on taking her in.

Unfortunately, Tanner and Evie weren’t exactly a couple that worked for me, perhaps because the start of this pairing felt too much like an accidental slip into a ‘relationship’ when Tanner was actually a rebound for Evie—for a woman who was hurting for her unrequited love—and Evie was simply someone whom he couldn’t resist. I couldn’t see the draw that brought them together apart from the very obvious physical attraction and Evie’s impulsive naïveté was off-putting at times, particularly with the more worldly Tanner who preferred women like him. It also seemed too easy for Evie, despite all the years of being in love with someone else, to shrug off the heartbreak and fall for Tanner in a matter of days because he’d been good to her, so she did seem emotionally flaky, and well, too needy for my liking.

I do like Sarah Mayberry’s writing however and that’s primarily the reason I requested for this book. Normally I expect heart-wrenching moments with every Mayberry book, but in this case oddly enough, the bull-riding scenes provided me more wide-eyed-wonder moments that had scarce little to do with the romance. From the looks of it, I probably wouldn’t continue with this series and that has more to do with the series not being one I could see myself getting into rather than Mayberry’s assured writing.

I'VE MISSED YOU SARAH! It's been too long.

So one of my all-time favorite authors is at it again (seriously, if you haven't read Anticipation, GO READ IT RIGHT NOW and thank me later), with the first in a series she's collaborating with a bunch of different authors to write. Tanner is her entry.

So nice, loyal Evie flies to meet up with Troy, the childhood friend/bull-riding guy of her dreams that she (after a one-night stand) believes is just as into their relationship as she is. And here is the least shocking moment of all: he's not, and when she meets up with him, she catches him sucking face with a buckle-bunny. But turns out the true guy of her dreams is also there for this awful moment: Tanner, Troy's opposite. Tanner and Evie get to know each other thanks to his over-developed hero complex, and thanks to some unfortunate (or fortunate?) circumstances that come up in Tanner's life, they get real REAL close.

This one doesn't do anything revolutionary, but it is still just doggone GOOD. I love the characters, and even appreciate how she doesn't completely villainize Troy. I was seriously rooting for Evie and Tanner, and practically cheered out loud at every major step forward in their relationship.

4 sold stars.

*I received a review copy from the publisher/author via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.*