Fool for Love by Beth Ciotta
St. Martin’s Paperbacks
August 2012
Format: Paperback, 368 pages
First line: “How many years do you think I’d get for death by Cuisinart?”
From the back cover: SHE’S CRAVING A SWEET NEW LIFE…
Call
her a fool, but chef-in-training Chloe Madison wants to have her cake
and eat it too. So when her boyfriend dumps her for some French tart,
she decides to start over from scratch—with a new life and job in Sugar
Creek, Vermont. What could be sweeter than cooking for an eccentric lady
who’s crazy for desserts? What could be more tempting than joining a
club called the Cupcake Lovers? Just one thing: local business-hunk Devlin Monroe…
AND HE’S THE ICING ON THE CUPCAKE
Although
he’s the grandson of Chloe’s fun-loving boss, Devlin Monroe is all
work and no play. Micro-managing the family business, he doesn’t have
time to indulge in life’s sweetest pleasures—until he meets Chloe. How
can he resist such a vibrant, beautiful woman who brings so much passion
to the table? But when old grudges and secrets threaten to destroy the
Cupcake Lovers, Devlin must decide if his feelings for Chloe are a
recipe for disaster—or a sinfully delicious ever-after…
My thoughts: This is the first in Beth Ciotta’s Cupcake Lovers series and I really enjoyed it! It’s a contemporary romance tale that you can’t help but get caught up in and root for the pair to figure things out and get it right.
Having just been dumped by her boyfriend, free-spirit Chloe is at her wit’s end. Luckily her best friend Monica has a solution – come up to Sugar Creek and be the companion to Daisy Monroe, a spitfire 70-something that needs someone to keep any eye on her. Not only will Chloe be able to use that culinary degree that she just got, but she will be near Monica. Sounds like a good plan, but things couldn’t be that easy. First, Chloe literally bumps into Daisy’s grandson Devlin, a hot hunk. Then she comes to find out that Daisy isn’t so easy to keep an eye on – she’s stubborn and still wants to live life.
In this first installment of the Cupcake Lovers series, we meet a whole new cast of characters. There’s Chloe, Daisy, Monica and Devlin along with Devlin’s brothers and sister, his cousins, and the rest of the Cupcake Lovers club members. Daisy’s a pip and I hope she’s around for a long time – her antics are hysterical!!! I love the premise behind the Cupcake Lovers – a club that was started back in the 1940s as a way for the members to commiserate over their loved ones away at war. They soon started shipping cupcakes over to the men and organizing charitable events here on the home-front. I also love that a few of the cupcake recipes are included in the back of the book – I will definitely be making a copy of these before returning my book to the library!
This is looking to be a promising new series andI am looking forward to reading the next book in this series, The Trouble With Love. Being introduced to so many characters in this first book, there are quite a few possibilities as to who the next book will focus on…although I do have my suspicions and that was before reading the short excerpt included at the back of this book. Do you read those excerpts or do you wait until the book comes out to find out what it’s about?
(I borrowed this book from the library.)
Books in this series:
- Fool for Love
- The Trouble With Love – due out March 2013
