A Sweet Mess Book Review

I want to thank NetGalley and St Martin’s Press for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This book releases July 14th 2020.

Disclaimer: This book comes out on July 14th, There is a lot of time between now and then. Some of the things I am going to bring up that I didn’t care for could be corrected by then.

What is this book about?
Aubrey Choi is a baker and owns her own bakery. Landon Kim is a famous food critic that has a blog and writes restaurant reviews for a famous magazine. Landon and Aubrey meet a bar and have a passionate one night stand but not before he randomly arrives at her bakery after being stranded with car trouble. He mistakenly buys a chocolate bundt cake for a 6 year old girl’s birthday. The problem is the little girl requested the cake be filled with peanut butter and gummy worms. Not knowing Aubrey is the owner of the bakery he write a negative review. Even after finding out how he came to eat the cake, Landon refuses to write a second review to correct his mistake. Instead, he comes up with a plan to save Aubrey’s bakery. It just involves spending 3 weeks in wine country with one another. Spending time with the man who had a hand in dismantling her business (and having a one night stand with) doesn’t sound like the best idea but it’s the only option she has. What is the plan to save her business and will it work? Can Landon and Aubrey work together or will their lust for one another get in the way?

What did I think?
I thought this was a quick and fast read. I didn’t love it but I didn’t hate it either. I enjoyed that it had strong female characters and that these characters were business owners and Korean American. I feel like we need more representation like this in books. I loved the talk about food and cakes. I can tell that the author really knows her stuff about food. There were parts that I found really funny and I felt like this mostly played out like a chick flick movie in my head. I didn’t love the transitions in this book. Certain parts jumped ahead a month or two leaving the reader wondering if they missed something. The author also switches between POV but there wasn’t any way for the reader to know it was happening. It would switch from Aubrey’s character to Landon in the next paragraph. I am hoping that when this book comes to a full print later this year that there will be some way to identify that this is happening. I didn’t love the plot twist and ending but it did end how must romantic novels do. Overall this is a pretty cute read. I look forward to more books by this author.

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