by Belinda Missen

On one shoulder, the angel told me this was a ridiculous, risky thing to undertake. On the other, the devil had taken my wedding ring from the bedside drawer, and was polishing it with all the fervour of Sméagol.

Yeah, it was just OK. Brenda Missen is a pretty good writer though. There were some funny lines, but I can’t think of any funny situations. She kept me reading.

I had problems with both the hero and the heroine. They had major personality flaws, and their actions were not very admirable or even understandable at times. I guess my main problems were with the heroine because, in a book like this, you kind of expect the hero to have some growth and learning to do to be worthy. At the beginning, Lucy was kind of in a dead-end with her life with a crap boyfriend. She had just quit her job with the school cafeteria in a huff because they didn’t accept her meal plan for the future. She does a cake for a friend’s wedding and it is a big hit, which gets her thinking about getting back to baking professionally. Her estranged husband, a now world-famous rich chef appears on the scene. He has decided to open a new restaurant in the small backwater town she lives in. It is a real place. I explored it on Google Earth, as I do. It is a really a plain small town in rural Australia about an hour and a half from Melbourne. Anyway, he swoops in and gives her 200,000 dollars to make up for leaving her with no financial support while he was pursuing his dream in France. Yeah. Then he hires her virtually as a partner in his venture at a 100,000 dollars a year. Despite this opportunity of a lifetime and deliverance from all of her financial woes, she remains sulky, resentful, and immature.

He’s no prize either. He’s kind of snobby about his European adventure and in an incident towards the end really is disrespectful and petulant. But I didn’t think he was as irritating as Lucy, who commands center stage because she is the first-person narrator.

Not much else happens other than romance, baking, and getting the restaurant off the ground. They decide to try to save their marriage and they are very happy until the big blow-up near the end. I won’t tell how it ends up, because for a while I wasn’t sure what would happen. At the end, I got what message the author was trying to send with the two leads and their relationship. ***2.75 stars***

September 30, 2020