CBR15 Book 11: "Not My Valentine" by Jackie Lau

Page count: 136 pages

Rating: 3 stars

This was an ARC from the author. My views are my own. 

Helen Tsang has sworn off love as a lost cause after her boyfriend dumped her last Valentine's Day and someone filmed it, making her a very involuntary viral sensation. However, as Valentine's Day is approaching once more, she feels like she is getting excessive sympathy and pity from friends, family, and even the staff of her regular bubble tea shop. She doesn't really want to field any more questions and decides to ask her friend Taylor to act as her fake boyfriend. They can "break up" a while after Valentine's Day, very amicably, so no one needs to remember the viral video anymore or think about Helen's love life in the future.

Of course, as is always the case with fake dating stories, it doesn't take long before Helen starts seeing Taylor in a new light. They've been friends for years, and Taylor was extremely supportive when she was so very publically dumped last year. For some reason, a lot of the romantic gestures which Helen claims to hate are rather adorable when Taylor does them. He sends her flowers, and pictures of heart-shaped cakes to tease her and doesn't at all mind posing for cutesy couples pictures for her Instagram feed. Of course, as Valentine's Day approaches once more, Helen starts wondering if she wants her fake relationship with her friend to become a real one. 

The grumpy-sunshine pairing is a relatively common trope in romance, as is the fake dating scenario. Helen and Taylor are a cute couple, and as always, in a Jackie Lau romance, there's a lot of descriptions of food and baking. Nevertheless, while this novella was a perfectly fine read, it never became anything special, and now, about a month after finishing the story (I'm once more behind on my reviews), I'm having trouble remembering much of the specifics at all.

This was OK, but there are much better Jackie Lau romances out there - including several fake dating stories. This won't be a waste of your time, but it's also unlikely to stick in your memory. 

Judging a book by its cover: While this is an illustrated cover, I appreciate that there are no cartoony people anywhere on it. Just a bunch of brightly-coloured baking supplies and a little phone. It doesn't hurt that I'm very partial to teal, which is the dominant cover colour.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

#CBR6 Book 7: "The Chocolate Temptation" by Laura Florand

Page count: 320 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Sarah Lin hates Patrick Chevalier. She hates his golden good looks, his charming manner, the way he seems to be able to create magic with his bare hands and does absolutely everything flawlessly, without seeming to expend even the slightest bit of effort. She hates him because every time he brushes past her, or winks at her, or jokingly flirts with her, her heart beats faster and she has trouble breathing. He is her boss, and he is godlike, and he would never even look twice at a lowly little intern who never seems to be able to do anything right.

Patrick Chevalier is madly in love with Sarah Lin, the intern in the world-famous French restaurant where they work. He is the second in command in the kitchen, he is her boss, and he knows that it is grossly inappropriate for him to even consider seducing her while she's under his tutelage. But she claims that she's going to go back to California once her internship is over in little over a month, and he might go insane if he doesn't get a chance to show her how she feels. His entire life, he has learned to keep his true hopes and dream deeply hidden, so they can't be snatched away from him. He's come to the conclusion that he has to use his wit and charm and skill to manipulate those around him to reach his goals. When Sarah in an unguarded moment lets it slip that she hates him, he's determined to turn that hate to love, just as he can turn sugar and chocolate into edible treasures.

Sarah's mother fled from North Korea and found a new life in the USA because she got pregnant and Sarah was born there. Becoming an engineer at Caltech to make her mother proud, Sarah feels as if she's let her entire family down when she gave up her high paying job as an engineer to pursue her dream to study as a pastry chef in Paris. Five months into her internship, she's wondering if she made a huge mistake. She can barely afford to pay the rent, she works until she drops, and all around her, the others in the kitchen create marvels while she feels she's a constant failure. The only woman in the whole kitchen, she struggles to keep up with the intense work, and spending so much time around a gorgeous man she's convinced could have any woman he turned his attention to, she's decided that the only way to guard her heart is by hating him intensely.

Patrick may be incredibly successful for his young age, although he never really wanted to become a chef, but an engineer. His messed-up mother made sure to crush any dream he ever had, and when he was apprenticed to up and coming Luc Leroi, one of his foster brothers, he made the best of it, using his inventiveness and intellect to excel in the kitchen. Even though no one understands why he's still content being Luc's second, when he could go off and get a brilliant career in a restaurant of his own, he knows that he is needed, and can't bring himself to leave. He also knows that he mustn't harass his pretty intern, but can't help from watching over her, trying to shield her from the hardest jobs in the kitchen, surreptitiously feeding her and making sure that he is the one who most often teaches her new techniques. He knows that she is clever and driven and just as perfectionistic as Luc, but he can't resist his protective urges. He believes himself to be sneaky, devious and ruthless and the way in which he tricks Sarah into inviting him in after a night out after work is certainly not entirely chivalrous, but while he has decided alpha male qualities (as do all of Florand's heroes), he never forces Sarah to do anything she doesn't really very much want to do.

Sarah needs to decide whether she actually wants to follow her dream to be a pastry chef and accept that she may not be a failure just because she can't keep up with insanely driven craftsmen who are at the top of their field. She comes to realise that while her birth gave her mother and sister a safe home in America, she doesn't have to live her entire life to fulfil some sort of imagined standard of perfection to prove herself worthy to them. Patrick has clearly been burned so many times growing up, and has turned the very bitter lemons of his cruddy upbringing into some fairly awesome lemonade. Yet he's desperately worried about losing Sarah once he gets his chance with her, and of all the dreams he has ever dared nurture, a relationship with her is the one that he daren't even hope he might achieve.

Compared to some of the deep emotional issues of Florand's earlier couples, Sarah and Patrick's troubles seemed a bit more low key, and it was a relief after the last two, with some very messed up protagonists and drama to work through. Parts of this book overlaps with Florand's previous book in the series, The Chocolate Heart, but I suspect it works fine on its own as well. Florand has played around with fairy tale and mythology elements in previous novels, with influences from Rapunzel, Beauty and the Beast and the myth of Hades and Persephone. In this book, there are hints of Cinderella, but while Patrick may be a prince (his surname is even Chevalier - knight), Sarah is much more than the girl who loses her shoe and heart at the ball. The author's note at the end of the book and her blog suggests that this may be the last in her Amour et Chocolat series (apparently Luc's book was supposed to be the final one, but Patrick kept stealing scenes so she had to write his story too), but she has more books planned, set in the south of France, so I suspect I will still have her delectable writing to look forward to for a while yet.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR6 Book 6: "The Chocolate Heart" by Laura Florand

Page count: 320 pages
Rating: 3.5 stars

Disclaimer! I was granted an ARC of this book by Kensington Books via Netgalley in return for a fair and honest review.

Summer Corey hates Paris. It's a city where she was frequently abandoned to be raised by ever changing nannies while her parents were globe trotting or negotiating international business deals, and it's where she felt miserable, alone and outcast in boarding school from the age of thirteen. Having been forced back from her self-imposed exile, teaching on a small Pacific island, because her father has bought her a five star hotel as a Christmas present, Summer knows that everyone is only waiting to see what the spoiled and vacuous billionaire heiress will do to end up in the tabloids now.

Of course, mistaking the internationally acclaimed chef of the hotel's restaurant, Luc Leroi, for a hotel bellboy, and propositioning him rather bluntly is not getting her off to a good start. Luc, having worked his way up from begging in the Paris metro with his gypsy father to becoming the media darling and culinary superstar of French pastry, is appalled when Summer literally falls into his arms and proceeds to offer him a yacht, before passing out exhausted as soon as he gets her to her hotel room. He plans to seduce her with the most delectable desserts, only to discover that Summer Corey, through a series of very negative associations with sweet things, never eats them.

Summer needs to stay three rainy winter months in Paris, pretending to manage a hotel, so her father will donate a satellite to the islands she longs to return to, improving their communication with the outside world immensely. Luc is determined to win her over, and proceeds to outdo himself again and again with breathtaking culinary creations that Summer continues to reject. The entire hotel watches in fascination, wondering who will crack first, the stunning heiress or the perfectionist chef.

As I have mentioned in my previous reviews of her books, Florand writes to a formula. These books have extremely temperamental, arrogant and brilliant French chefs, who nonetheless are deeply emotionally vulnerable. They all seem to fall for women who are at least partly American, with emotional issues of their own. The men try to seduce the women using culinary arts, usually involving seemingly unreal creations made of chocolate, and after a lot of back and forth where they battle their insecurities, they find their HEA.

Florand works really hard to make the readers feel sympathy with Summer, and make us realise why she has very legitimate reasons for hating Paris, and having behaved like a spoiled and outrageous brat for much of her life. To say that she has enormous daddy issues is an understatement, and she seems to think that the way to punish her parents is by throwing everything like self respect out the window and use her body to manipulate men as best she can, preferably to provoke her father as much as possible. It doesn't help that he literally blackmails her in an attempt to give up her dreams, and never really seems to compliment her for anything. But the fact remains, she's insanely wealthy and because of her upbringing, quite sheltered to the issues that less obscenely rich people have to go through, and in my opinion, it takes far too long for her to realise that her behaviour towards Luc at the start of the book is wildly inappropriate and offensive to boot.

While I normally really enjoy these romances, there was something about this book that didn't grab me as much. Whether it was the fact that Luc was so intensely controlled and refused to relinquish said control for the longest time, or it was just that it took me more than half the book to warm up to Summer as a truly sympathetic heroine, I'm not sure. All I know is that I didn't enjoy this book quite as much as Florand's earlier works. It's by no means bad, though, but I'm not going to add it to my own library until I find it for sale. The next book features Luc's second in command/foster brother as the hero, and as he is wonderful in this book, I'm looking forward to his story.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR5 Book 31. "The Chocolate Kiss" by Laura Florand

320 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Magalie Chaudron lives high in a tower over the tiny tea salon La Maison des Sorcières (the witches' house). In the window there is always a unique chocolate display depicting magical wonders, the walls are decorated with witches' hats and customers can buy divine hot chocolate that Magalie has stirred wishes of happiness and prosperity into. When world renowned pastry chef Philippe Lyonnais decides to open his most recent pastry shop just down the street from their salon, Magalie is convinced this will steal all their customers away and drive the aunts out of business. She goes to warn Philippe to stay away, but only succeeds in making him more determined.

Philippe is enchanted with the fierce woman who comes to his shop and tries to make him move his shop. He tries to placate her with a macaron made from his own hand, and she flatly refuses. In return, he refuses all of Magalie's attempts to try her hot chocolate, not entirely certain the little witch hasn't added poison to it, or whether drinking it will turn him into a toad. No matter how hateful she is to him, he is determined to win her over, becoming obsessed with discovering the perfect creation to make her fall for him, as he has fallen for her.

The Chocolate Kiss is a sequel of sorts to The Chocolate Thief, and feature cameos from Sylvain and Cade briefly, but the reader in no way needs to have read the first to enjoy the second. While The Chocolate Thief was a fluffy, light-hearted romp, there is more angst and a much slower build-up in this one. Magalie is a terribly stubborn and determined, and self-sufficient to the point of idiocy, with massive trust issues and a huge fear of commitment because her parents kept uprooting her throughout her childhood and adolescence, until she never had a proper home or anyone she could rely on.

She creates this perceived image of Philippe as a spoiled, arrogant fairy-tale prince, who will ride in to her fairy-tale existence on the Ilê de St. Louis in Paris, and lay waste to all she holds dear. She's convinced that if her aunt's cafe loses its customers, she will lose her safe haven and have to move yet again, and never stops to listen to her aunts when they tell her that they're quite happy for the tea shop to remain a secret, known only to some, and that they really don't need the revenue from it. As she keeps fighting her attraction to Philippe, her wishes seem to drive every woman who drinks a cup of her chocolate straight towards his pastry shop, until it drives him mad with frustration.

Philippe is not particularly spoiled, and has worked very hard to become as famous as he is. Like Sylvain, he can be seen as arrogant, because he knows he has no rivals in his field. A driven man, he has enormous self control, in all matters that don't concern Magalie. Because of his supportive family and thoroughly functional and happy upbringing, he is also patient and secure enough in his feelings for her that even when she tries her best to drive him away, desperately afraid that she'll get hurt, he endures Magalie's tantrums and insecurities, certain that with time, he can draw the witch out of her ivory tower and they will have their happily ever after.

On quite a few occasions while reading this book, I really did want to shake Magalie and tell her to snap out of it, and kind of thought that Philippe should probably move on and find someone who actually deserved his awesomeness, but at the same time, Florand takes the time to show why she has such a difficult time trusting people and opening herself up to others. It would have been a lot more unsatisfying and unrealistic if she jumped into Philippe's arms, ready for her HEA after one kiss and the slow build from antagonists to lovers was different from what I'd expected when reading The Chocolate Thief, but no less satisfying.

#CBR5 Book 29. "The Chocolate Thief" by Laura Florand

Page count: 320 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Cade Corey, heir to a multi-billion dollar fortune, whose family makes the mass produced chocolate bars sold in every supermarket in America, wants to establish a gourmet chocolate line, and she wants the name of a top of the line French chocolatier to help her sell the enterprise. As Sylvain Marquis is the most sought after and famous French chocolate artisan, she offers him the chance to make a fortune, and he turns her down flat, outraged at her impudence. Having worked his way up to become the best, he will not sell out to some presumptuous American, whose family makes what can barely be called chocolate.

Not one to give up easily, Cade resolves to put the arrogant, but oh so handsome man out of her mind, convinced that her family's fortunes and the promise to make insane amounts of money will sway one of the chocolatiers of Paris to join in her business venture. Of course, forgetting Sylvain Marquis would be a lot easier if the flat she had rented didn't overlook his shop, and she didn't keep running into him in shops and restaurants in the area. Her father thinks she is foolish to be wasting time in Paris in the first place, her grandfather encourages her to conduct industrial espionage and steal Sylvain's secrets. So when the opportunity arises to do just that, Cade sneaks into Sylvain's labratoire to see what she can find. Her snooping doesn't go undetected, however, and soon the Internet food blogs are abuzz with rumours of a chocolate thief stealing the delectable Marquis chocolates in the dead of night.

I discovered this book thanks to the Dabwaha tournament, an annual March Madness style competition, run by Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and Dear Author. As the book was also fortuitously on sale on Amazon the other week, I jumped at the chance to try it (not just because reading about hot Frenchmen who can do wonders with chocolate is much more fun than doing correction work), and I'm very glad I did. It was a very quick read, and I'm sure that if I'd spent days over it, I could have found more flaws. But I didn't, and I don't want to pick holes in it.

Sylvain Marquis is a wonderful hero, at once both arrogant and self-assured about his professional expertise, yet surprisingly insecure and doubtful about himself and his ability to impress women. He knows he's the best at what he does in terms of chocolate, and he knows he can win practically any woman over with the promise of his sinfully delicious gourmet treats, but never having had any success holding on to women long-term, and having been a gangly teenager who kept getting friend-zoned, he's still terrified that Cade will leave him, like all the other beautiful women have.

Cade has never met anyone who isn't impressed with her family's money and influence, and is baffled when she comes to Paris and everyone seems to find her money vulgar and offensive. Even offering exorbitant sums of money won't get her a carton of milk at a café, and the Corey family name is certainly not something any chocolatier worth his salt in France will want to be associated with. Everyone assumes she's had an easy life because of her money, when in fact, her stay in Paris is the first time in years she's had any time to herself. She's used to people constantly asking for help to fund things, and aware that most men can't see past her vast fortune to see the woman she really is. She's hard working, diligent and very loyal to her family and all the people who depend on her in the business, but in Sylvain's labratoire  she experiences a magical world that she desperately wants to be a part of. That the owner of that world attracts her and infuriates her to no end, makes her livid, but she also finds it refreshing that he seems drawn to her despite her money, not because of it.

Florand clearly loves Paris, and chocolate, and chocolate making makes for a surprisingly sexy setting for a romance. It's probably not surprising that a gorgeous man who creates amazing chocolates makes for an attractive romantic hero, but it's his insecurities, and the fact that he's not actually very good with women that makes Sylvain so likable. He keeps screwing up and saying and doing the wrong things, and then he's not afraid to admit his mistakes and apologise, trying to make amends. While he's appalled by her attempts to buy his name for her company, Sylvain decides he wants to seduce Cade fairly early on, and he works very systematically and cleverly to do so. It takes a strong and stubborn woman to withstand his attentions for as long as Cade did.

There is apparently already another book in the series, which various review assure me is even more enjoyable than this one. So I will definitely be checking out more of Florand's books.