Astrid Hawk
Read this for a Kindle challenge, and while it was certainly more enjoyable than reading one of the thousands of formulaic cringey romances on KU, it was... underwhelming. The synopsis makes it sound like the magical element in the baked goods is going to somehow play a critical role, but it is disappointingly not at all mysterious nor particularly pivotal in the book.
The plot was... fine. It's supposed to be a cozy, feel-good read, so it didn't surprise me that the stakes were never terribly high, even when there was conflict (and of course the 3rd act breakup, even though this wasn't a pure romance).
My biggest complaint with this book was the constant peppering of French words and phrases mixed into the English whenever bilingual French characters were speaking. It irritated me, since it was all French vocabulary that one learns in beginner French class, and a bilingual speaker would not bother substituting individual remedial words in their native language and then go on to use much more complicated sentence structures and vocabulary in their second language. For example, a French speaker at one point says "She wore une robe, a very beautiful dress...". Why in the world would she bother substituting "une robe" for "a dress" only to actually use the word "dress" in the very next part of the sentence? I realize this sounds nitpicky, but the novel is littered with examples like this that just grated on me. I have French friends... this isn't how they speak English.
Read this for a Kindle challenge, and while it was certainly more enjoyable than reading one of the thousands of formulaic cringey romances on KU, it was... underwhelming. The synopsis makes it sound like the magical element in the baked goods is going to somehow play a critical role, but it is disappointingly not at all mysterious nor particularly pivotal in the book.
The plot was... fine. It's supposed to be a cozy, feel-good read, so it didn't surprise me that the stakes were never terribly high, even when there was conflict (and of course the 3rd act breakup, even though this wasn't a pure romance).
My biggest complaint with this book was the constant peppering of French words and phrases mixed into the English whenever bilingual French characters were speaking. It irritated me, since it was all French vocabulary that one learns in beginner French class, and a bilingual speaker would not bother substituting individual remedial words in their native language and then go on to use much more complicated sentence structures and vocabulary in their second language. For example, a French speaker at one point says "She wore une robe, a very beautiful dress...". Why in the world would she bother substituting "une robe" for "a dress" only to actually use the word "dress" in the very next part of the sentence? I realize this sounds nitpicky, but the novel is littered with examples like this that just grated on me. I have French friends... this isn't how they speak English.