While offering scrumptious recipes, this tale of a baker embracing God’s path to true love lacks a convincing plot.
A wistful and talented dessert maven hopes to find the Christian man of her dreams in this debut faith-based romance.
Patti Murray is known as “Patti Cake” for her superb cake-decorating skills as well as her delicious recipes. Her home business, Exquisite Cakes, is steadily growing in Santa Rosa, California. She’s content in her professional life, but her personal life is lagging. She wants to marry and start a family but feels strongly about marrying a similarly devoted Christian. Patti often talks to God about what she wants in a mate, and hopes that he can deliver someone appropriate to “capture the spirit of true, unending love.” When Patti is least expecting it, not one but two contenders materialize. She literally runs into Dr. Cal Ripland, a local dentist, in several ill-fated episodes. He’s a quiet man but she feels drawn to him. While he weathered a loss when his wife died, he still manages to hang onto his faith. Jim Callahan storms onto the scene with his outsized, film star personality to buy a cake for his sister’s wedding, and attempts to impress Patti with the trappings of his fame. He’s passionate and handsome, but she questions whether he really possesses the personal character she desires. She’s torn between the two men until meditating on her personal beliefs, and their faith, makes it clear who is the right match. Ingersoll’s decadent descriptions of Patti’s cake and pie recipes and the inclusion of full recipes in the appendix help their sweetness jump off the page with mouthwatering detail. But the dialogue is often stilted. Jim’s character becomes trite, with an unnecessary kidnapping and gun battle right out of a Hollywood film. The clunky, repeated phrase “the actor Jim from the movies” appears too often. The ending then rushes into an implausible resolution. While the tale should appeal to Christian romance fans, general audiences will likely find the frequent, page-long conversations with God too slow-paced.
While offering scrumptious recipes, this tale of a baker embracing God’s path to true love lacks a convincing plot.Pub Date: April 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4917-9471-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt and funny, this enemies-to-lovers romance shows that the best things in life are all-inclusive and nontransferable...
An unlucky woman finally gets lucky in love on an all-expenses-paid trip to Hawaii.
From getting her hand stuck in a claw machine at age 6 to losing her job, Olive Torres has never felt that luck was on her side. But her fortune changes when she scores a free vacation after her identical twin sister and new brother-in-law get food poisoning at their wedding buffet and are too sick to go on their honeymoon. The only catch is that she’ll have to share the honeymoon suite with her least favorite person—Ethan Thomas, the brother of the groom. To make matters worse, Olive’s new boss and Ethan’s ex-girlfriend show up in Hawaii, forcing them both to pretend to be newlyweds so they don’t blow their cover, as their all-inclusive vacation package is nontransferable and in her sister’s name. Plus, Ethan really wants to save face in front of his ex. The story is told almost exclusively from Olive’s point of view, filtering all communication through her cynical lens until Ethan can win her over (and finally have his say in the epilogue). To get to the happily-ever-after, Ethan doesn’t have to prove to Olive that he can be a better man, only that he was never the jerk she thought he was—for instance, when she thought he was judging her for eating cheese curds, maybe he was actually thinking of asking her out. Blending witty banter with healthy adult communication, the fake newlyweds have real chemistry as they talk it out over snorkeling trips, couples massages, and a few too many tropical drinks to get to the truth—that they’re crazy about each other.
Heartfelt and funny, this enemies-to-lovers romance shows that the best things in life are all-inclusive and nontransferable as well as free.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2803-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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