lightreads

Battle 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.

The Austin Playbook

3/5. Het romance featuring young actress cast in a live televised Jane Austin who-done-it mashup and the sharp-tongued critic whose bankrupt estate hosts the project. Of the usual Parker sort – sarcastic man meets his bantery match in a bright, optimistic woman. It's a formula I enjoy. Mostly, though, I'll remember this for something that occupied only a few lines. She at one point casually says that she can't have penetrative sex at the moment because she has mid-cycle pelvic pain, and he says okay, and they move on, and that's it. How often do you see that? Plus, it opened the door for a scene of non-penetrative sex, which are almost always more interesting to me in het romance.

Pretty Face

3/5. Het romance about the screen actress typecast into a sexy role trying to make her debut on the stage, and her super cranky director. If this were on the AO3, it would be tagged snark to lovers, workplace romance, we can't touch oh no, except we totally did anyway, family issues.

I'm enjoying this series. The characters are actual adults with adult problems and families that hit that right balance between complicated and charming. And the romance is one of my preferred shapes, where they both realize relatively early on that this might be the real deal, but at least one of them has completely explicable reasons to hesitate.

If I have a complaint, it's that this leans too heavily on that trope where someone is sexist to the heroine, and the hero gets to ride to the rescue. It's not as annoying as this usually is, as it's part of the hero's growing understanding of her, and how much sexism she is subjected to, and the ways she is resigned to it and the ways she isn't. Still. It's a little annoying.