Two rival caterers, one very long wedding season, and a book that trusts you to wait. Bloom writes tension like a person who's actually been in a kitchen. Four stars, with one real complaint about the third act I can only make behind a spoiler warning — see below.

SPOILERS — Priya on the third actShow / hide

The third-act breakup is caused by a misread text message. In a book this careful about how people actually talk in kitchens, that's a cheat, and it costs the ending about ten pages of trust it had earned.

Bought copy More from Priya →

TAKE 02

June Achterberg

Literary and translated fiction. Short books, long sentences. Hard rater.

3 of 5 DEPENDS Finished · Spoiler-free

Better written than it needs to be, which I mean as a compliment and a complaint.

I don't read much romance and I was braced for the prose to be functional. It isn't; some of the kitchen passages are genuinely good. The problem is that the sentences occasionally forget they're in a romance and stop to admire the light. Depends: if you like the genre you'll love it, and if you don't, this is a decent place to try.

Library copy More from June →

Where they agreed

Both say it's better written than the genre requires, and both mean it at least partly as praise.

Where they split

Whether that's a feature. Priya says the prose serves the tension. June says it occasionally stops to admire itself.

Summary drafted from the reviews above and checked by an RNKD editor. It adds nothing the readers didn't say. How Roundtables work

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Salt & Ceremony

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