When Only Cupcakes Will Do by Daisy James

Blurb

When life gives you lemons, make lemon-drizzle cupcakes…

Lucie thought that proposing to her boyfriend in Tiffany’s would be the best day of her life. Until he said no. In just a few seconds, her whole world is turned upside-down! And when she accidentally switches cocoa powder for chilli powder at work, she finds herself out of a job, too…

Baking has always made life better in the past, but can Lucie really bake her way to happiness? Starting her own company, selling cupcakes out of an old ice cream van might just be the second chance that Lucie needs!

Of course, she never expected to find love along the way…

Review

I loved the premise - I wanna run The Travelling Cupcake Company, but I'd have to learn how to bake first...

I skipped through the book after about the first half mainly because it was a little repetitive, a little too much inside the main character's head. The actual story itself, I enjoyed, but I found myself skimming several long introspective paragraphs to get to the meat of it.

That said, Lucie grows and develops throughout the story and I enjoyed following her journey, and Ed is gorgeous (who wouldn't fall in love with a handsome Italian who does all the cooking!!).

The dialogue was on occasion unrealistic I felt, rather flowery and preachy and not quite like normal speech and it did detract a bit, and I had an issue with continuity in one place in particular regarding a mobile phone and had to go back and re-read, taking me right out of the story. But all this is probably personal preference and may be a bit on the nit-picky side.

There weren't any surprises in this book, but that's okay because of the nature of the genre. Anything other than a HEA with the guy in question would have left me disgruntled (love that word!). I did a sort of double take at the location of the ending, and I get why the author did it, but to me it felt a little weird - but again, that may be me...

I felt this wasn't the best example of the genre, but nevertheless I did quite enjoy it and will probably give another of Ms James' novels a go.