A Recipe for Disaster by Belinda MissenMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Three and a half stars.
This is like a typical English small town novel, but it's set in a small town outside Melbourne, Australia - so that's different.
Lucy Williams used to be a talented patissier and cake maker but after her equally talented husband (and childhood sweetheart) Oliver Murray left her to open a restaurant in Paris she has let all that slide and is now barely making ends meet as a school chef. She is also dating a useless lump of a footballer called Seamus.
When Lucy is asked to make a wedding cake for a friend after her professional baker died suddenly little does she realise that the couple have also asked Oliver to cater the wedding. When they meet across the wedding cake for the first time in three years it's as if he'd never left.
Lucy then discovers that Oliver isn't just back for the wedding, he's persuaded his investors to open a cafe/ restaurant in their sleepy little town, oh and he wants Lucy back, and he might want her to bake the cakes for the cafe.
This was a fun read and I really liked Lucy, the trouble was I didn't have the same warm fuzzy feelings about Oliver. Some of his behaviour seemed inexcusable and confusing. Why didn't he think to send money to his wife to cover the mortgage? His attitude also seemed a bit contradictory, at events he seemed to swan around networking with guests instead of doing the work but then Lucy sees him working alone late at night in the cafe cleaning floors etc. I think perhaps some of Oliver's behaviour was a plot device and not properly thought through.
Overall, I didn't buy the romance and I needed Oliver to grovel whereas it felt more that Lucy realised she had been an unsupportive wife just because she had her own career!
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