This isn’t what I imagined my life would be. I care about Chelsea, I do, she’s been my best (and only) friend since we were teenagers. I love her, but I don’t feel that passionate love that people always talk about. Who knows? Maybe that kind of romanticized love only exists in books and movies. That’s what I have always told myself, at least. But after I meet Aidan, I know that’s not true. For … know that’s not true. For the first time, I’ve met someone who makes me feel passionate love. And I can’t deny my feelings any longer, even if it turns my entire life upside down.
I’ve got my bakery, I’ve got my friends, life is good.
But I suppose it would be nice to have a romantic interest in my life. In this conservative town, I’ve dated just about every gay man I can find. And while some have been nice enough, nobody has really clicked for me. I know I should probably move out of this town to open up my options, but I’ve got my bakery here and I can’t imagine giving up my business.
It’s in my bakery that I meet Miles. He and his fiancee, Chelsea, are looking to design their wedding cake. Only he doesn’t seem that interested in the cake… or her, for that matter. But I do keep catching him staring at me…
This standalone gay-for-you novel comes complete with HEA ending!
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“Baked in Love” is Flatter Than My Bubbie’s Matzoh…
Right off the bat: 60% of this is actual book and 40% is previews of two of Hunt’s other novels Very Late Blooming (which I’m reviewing next) and Puppy Love, (which I have already reviewed) a balance which is fairly consistent in all of Hunt’s offerings. ( AUTHORS: If your other book is any good, trust me, I’m going to know it within 5 pages, I don’t need SIX CHAPTERS to convince me so spend your time writing more book so I can have 95% book and 5% sales pitch.)
Hunt gives us two more generically bland characters with the same predictable one straight guy/one gay guy set up only this time we’re in a generic, unnamed small town in the conservative south. (I assume the town is unnamed because naming a real location would require Hunt to actually do some research to describe the place in detail.). Straight guy Miles is engaged to his girlfriend of ten years out of obligation, ready to commit himself to a passionless life because he thinks that’s what long time relationships feel like. As usual, our straight protagonist has no interesting past, no family, no friends no interests, no NOTHING. He just goes to work, comes home and tunes out the fiancee all night. (Which, I can totally understand because if I were engaged to someone as uninteresting and one dimensional as the fiance in Hunt’s story, I’d tune her ass out too.) Miles literally has no feelings whatsoever until he meets Aidan the town baker tasked with making his wedding cake. Aidan at least has a small family history, an interesting job, some friends are mentioned (but conveniently written out of the plot because again, creating more characters would actually require effort and why bother doing that when you can just lazily bounce back and forth between the two protagonists in first person narrative almost the entire time?) and he has at least dated a few guys making Aiden the slightly less bland of the two but in this case it’s really just a choice between flour and corn meal.
Chelsea, the aforementioned poor fiancee who discovers her man is gay after 10 years of being with him is an absolutely brilliant opportunity to create a character on the edge, a woman whose life and everything she believes in is turned completely upside down by one single confession… How does Hunt handle this opportunity?
“I put my hand on her back. “Are you going to be okay, Chelsea?” She looked at me. “You know what? I really am. I’m going to be fine. It’ll hurt for a little while… But I think this is for the best.”
This is my biggest criticism of Hunt’s work in general. When given a choice, Hunt always takes the easy way out. It’s lazy and overall insulting to the reader’s intelligence. Romance isn’t sensible. It’s not tidy or convenient. Romance is MESSY. It’s full of drama and great passions and that’s why people love this genre so don’t cheat us out of a great story by creating characters that always make boring choices with equally boring reactions.
Our usual one and only hurdle this time around is a bit more high stakes than in Hunt’s other books (which normally consists of a dumb decision made by one character requiring later forgiveness by the other) by having our couple face discrimination when Chelsea’s family outs them in revenge for Miles’s break up. This is the crux of both their stories but is essentially whittled down to one generic old lady coming into the bakery and spouting hellfire prompting the two of them to decide it’s time to leave small town life. How do they accomplish this? Hunt again takes the easy way out by bringing in a fairy godfather character in the form of a bakery chain owner sympathetic to their plight offering to buy the bakery at selling price AND offer Aidan a job as a manager of one of his struggling stores on the west coast at 50% higher salary than he had expected. Isn’t that nice???? Cue the obligatory HEA wedding scene… (Chelsea’s, not theirs, this time!) and you have another empty calorie dessert, mildly enjoyable but in the end, leaving you feel let down after the sugar crash.