Review: Meet Me at the Cupcake Cafe by Jenny Colgan

From Goodreads:

Issy Randall can bake. No, Issy can create stunning, mouthwateringly divine cakes. After a childhood spent in her beloved Grampa Joe's bakery, she has undoubtedly inherited his talent. She's much better at baking than she is at filing, so when she's laid off from her desk job, Issy decides to open her own little café. But she soon learns that her piece-of-cake plan will take all of her courage and confectionary talent to avert disaster.Funny and sharp, Meet Me at the Cupcake Café is about how life might not always taste like you expect, but there's always room for dessert!


My Review:

I finished this book earlier in the week.  It wasn't my favourite, by I didn't dislike it either.  I have never read any of Jenny Colgan's novels before, so this was my first foray into her world.  I amparticipating in a group challenge where a partner selects three titles from your to-read shelf at random and you have three months to read them.  This was the first selection from my partner.

I expected Meet Me at the Cupcake Cafe to have more of a Sophie Kinsella feel to it than it did.  I found it slow in the beginning, but after a few chapters, I was a little more entrenched in the plot and characters, quirks and all.  It is definitely chick-lit with all the romance, drama, and betrayal you'd expect.  However, it has the added bonus of including recipes that relate to the chapter you're currently reading.  The recipes are written by the Alzheimer-suffering grandfather to his granddaughter embarking on a new course in life and aren't written as recipes.  I think the sweetness with which they're related was one of my favourite parts of this book. 

By the end of the novel, with the inevitable happy ever after, I was smiling and wanted to know what came next - so much so that I checked out the next title in the series through my e-library.  This is not a deep read and some may find it difficult to get into the rhythm of the book.   There were some curse words sprinkled without and it did touch on mature subject matter (I feel like a parental advisory at the beginning of a television show!)  Not for everyone, but it was a quick and often sweet (yes, the pun was intentional) read.