Review: This book could use some tweaking.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 01 22, 2014
This is a hard book for me to review. On one hand, I really enjoyed the premise of this book. A single woman who co-owns a bakery with the man she really is in love with, but who doesn't know it while she's trying to save the shop from going out of business all the while not trying to lose the man she loves. I thought going into the book we would see a push and pull between Jack, the female protagonist, and Graham, the male lead. Which we did, but I felt the characters only spun their wheels and never covered much ground for the majority of the book. That was the strongest theme that irked me while reading. There were many inconsistencies with character interaction that made no sense, redundancy, lack of character development, unexplained backstory, and a flat ending. Now throw on top of all that, Jack had a secret ability of some kind that allowed her to smell what a person desires. Umm, huh?The whole super sniffer Jack had would have been a cute touch if it was presented better. Crispell didn't really introduce it well to the reader, and it felt lackluster and didn't make much sense to the story. Really, the super sniffer could have been taken out altogether. It muddled down the story.I don't want to harp on this book too bad. There are very good elements I liked. I really loved the overall plot. The whole thing of Jack struggling with her business while struggling with her love life and her family was a good mix. While I loved the sexual tension that Jack and Graham had, I didn't understand really why didn't they just get together. Graham's hangups with Jack's brother Hutton wasn't strong enough in my eyes to keep these two apart. Especially when in the story it seemed that Hutton was going to accept Graham being with Jack but then later shut Graham out by not talking to him. I was confused.After reading Love and Cupcakes, I felt that this book needed another pair of eyes to help smooth out the story. There were too many questions, caps, left that I wanted answered: Like did Harper keep her baby or not. She spoke of getting having an abortion, but it wasn't really talked about after. Maybe I missed it. Or what was the real animosity the sisters really had? I didn't get that either. I think with a proper content edit Love and Cupcakes could be amazing. I love all the bones this story has, I just wanted a little more out of it.