Battle Royal by Lucy Parker
Oct. 27th, 2021 01:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsBattle Royal
3/5. Rival bakers with very different esthetics are judges on not!GBBO and snark their way into a sweet romance as they compete to make the cake for the next royal wedding.
This feels like a pandemic book to me, even though it has zero pandemic content. There's something about the focus on loneliness and isolation, the preoccupation with loss that feels like a book someone would write in 2020. It's a story with a deeply fluffy exterior about people who are both painfully lonely, and what they find in each other. There's a lot else going on in this book (too much, actually, you could lose an entire B plot and a half out of this thing no problem) but that's the heart of it. I like Parker's romances because her couples don't always come to each other easily or with grace, but they generally both recognize what they've found by halfway through the book, and how good it could be, and treat that with tenderness and care. It's nice.
Content notes: Recollections of child emotional abuse, death of parents and parental figures, grief of various sorts.
3/5. Rival bakers with very different esthetics are judges on not!GBBO and snark their way into a sweet romance as they compete to make the cake for the next royal wedding.
This feels like a pandemic book to me, even though it has zero pandemic content. There's something about the focus on loneliness and isolation, the preoccupation with loss that feels like a book someone would write in 2020. It's a story with a deeply fluffy exterior about people who are both painfully lonely, and what they find in each other. There's a lot else going on in this book (too much, actually, you could lose an entire B plot and a half out of this thing no problem) but that's the heart of it. I like Parker's romances because her couples don't always come to each other easily or with grace, but they generally both recognize what they've found by halfway through the book, and how good it could be, and treat that with tenderness and care. It's nice.
Content notes: Recollections of child emotional abuse, death of parents and parental figures, grief of various sorts.