Gaele Hi
Roxy has, after a few months dating Jackson, allowed her nerves and a few too many cocktails to take control, and proposed to Jackson as they were sitting in the audience at a television show taping. Her drunken slurring is compounded by his deer in the headlights look and a firm no, leaving her depressed, not only is she without a boyfriend but she’s out of work and now hiding in the house because it feels like everyone saw her get turned down on television. But a chance encounter with a frantic woman in the grocery store leads to a short-term job, helping out Poppy with her start-up catering company baking treats for a pop-up ice rink and preparing meals for her boyfriend’s small B & B. Wiling to help and utterly unwilling to tell the truth and disappoint a stranger, Roxy claims more experience than she has and is soon googling baking tips and tricks before starting the next day. And the rest of the book is pretty much Roxy finding some opportunity to try something new, unwilling to try or be honest with her lack of experience, and then bumbling through to mixed results. See Roxy has a secret – scarred by a fire just after leaving school, and subsequently being left for another by her boyfriend – tragic and made worse by her desperate need to appease all she encounters, with self-esteem that is so low as to be negligible, Roxy never really utters a sentence that isn’t ‘qualified’ by a comparison to someone or something else. Then, of course, her ex shows up with his ‘new girlfriend’ and even as she HEARS him uttering the same lines (tired and unimaginative) to the new girl, she can’t help but wonder if he’s interested in her… Yeah. Roxy was a throw the eReader across the room, repeatedly, sort of character. I kept reading, HOPING that somewhere this girl would pick up a six-pack of get a clue and see what an ass her ex is, and to stop sending EVERYONE mixed messages, but even up to the last pages, she wasn’t finding her clue. I was tired of her lack of awareness, and her inability to see herself in even the smallest of positive ways. Quite simply, in this story full of 30-somethings, it was a 17 year old girl who spoke the most (and almost only) sense in the story. But still, I read on, hoping that something would finally dawn on Roxy and she’d see what was in front of her. And that came, in painstakingly slow and miniscule bits, with plenty of the sense that I’d been here before, and when the ending arrived, and most of the ends wrapped up in a few quick paragraphs – I was ultimately disappointed. I think readers who loved the first book in this series may find positives, and the setting and concept were lovely, but the story didn’t hold up for me as one that encourages my curiosity about this author. I received an eArc copy of the title from the publisher via NetGalley for purpose of honest review. I was not compensated for this review: all conclusions are my own responsibility.
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