27 Jul 2014

The Wedding Gift (by Lucy Kevin)

I had never heard of Lucy Kevin. But, always happy to come across an interesting looking free Kindle book, I downloaded this a couple of years ago, and finally got around to reading it.

The Wedding Gift is a typical light romance for women, with - as is common these days - a cookery theme. In this story, the heroine (Julie) has taken on a temporary job at the Rose Chalet after the closure of her own restaurant; she blames the failure on a negative review by a food critic called Andrew who - unsurprisingly - is the hero of the book. It’s not a new plot opening; I thought, immediately, of Debbie Macomber's ‘Angels at the Table’ which involves something similar, although the people and circumstances (and, indeed, the rest of the story) are very different.

Julie and Andrew meet when he visits the Rose Chalet to check what is planned for his brother’s wedding menu. His main criticism of Julie is that her cooking is bland and unadventurous. So - after he rejects her best efforts, she decides on a radically new menu for her next clients who - again, predictably - wanted something traditional.

It’s all rather cliched, and in real life I would assume that people booking a wedding meal would let the caterers know in advance what kind of food they wanted - or didn’t want - rather than leave it entirely up to the caterers to come up with something special that might be completely wrong for them.

The romance develops much against Julie’s better judgement, with some unlikely scenes at a TV studio and rather too much introspection on the part of both main characters. Still, I was interested to find out what would happen - or, rather, how the inevitable would happen - and it passed the time pleasantly enough.

However, I have no inclination to buy the other books in the series.

Review copyright 2014 Sue's Book Reviews

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