Genre: Chick Lit
Pages: 364
Published: 2017
Brydie Benson's life isn't going so well. She's living with her best friend and is reeling from a bad relationship. So when she gets the chance to start over, she gladly takes the chance. She gets to live in a great house, rent free, as long as she takes care of the owner's dog. She takes a job in a bakery, and off she goes.
On the path to rebuilding, she meets many people along the way, including a handsome doctor, people at the dog park, and Pauline, the owner of the dog and house she's taking care of with a mysterious past. Soon the puppy becomes a bigger part of her life than she could have imagined and even finds that she is a great baker for pets, gaining her popularity in the pet community. Maybe starting over isn't so bad after all.
Sometimes you just need some indulgence, although this book wasn't perfect.
First off, my copy wasn't proofread. There were glaring mistakes on the back cover and throughout the book (Nathan wasn't a veterinarian, but a doctor). That's stuff that should have gotten past editing easily.
Secondly, this is barely a Christmas book, so don't judge the book by its cover. Very little of it takes place at Christmas, so you can read this any time of year. Actually, I'm not sure why I waited so many months to review it. This really isn't a holiday book, though it does briefly do some things with Thanksgiving and a little Christmas.
Thirdly, there wasn't much of a "storyline." Not necessarily a bad thing- some of my favorite books don't have solidly solid plotlines. But in Pupcakes, the conflict doesn't stem from any external or internal issues; rather, whenever the author wants to include conflict, she just has Brydie get angry for no reason. Sometimes I just didn't like her very much. She and Nathan don't speak for weeks after what seemed, to me, a very minor argument. I would have liked to see conflict drawn straight from the plot instead of created on the spot. Also, because some things are so easy for Brydie (she gets a job right off the bat; she gets to live in a great house rent-free), there's just not as much tension as there could be. This is definitely an escapist "live in another character's world for a while" story, similar to a few Jenny Colgan novels I read this year. Thus, there isn't always much of a focus. If I had to choose some, Brydie doesn't love everything about her life. She envies her best friend with a child and another on the way. She wants to get over a past relationship. So I guess it's about that: starting over and fixing the things that pop up.
Fourth, this is chick lit and there is a predictability factor. The old lady with failing health, the bakery, the relationship, finding secret letters and memories in the basement of an old house, etc. What I enjoy, though, is that things usually don't get resolved in an extremely predictable manner. More bothersome to me, though, is that some of the issues that come up get resolved WAY too quickly or are so small but the characters are making a huge fuss about them. Brydie repairs her tense relationship with her mother (and Nathan, which really didn't even need repairing to begin with) so fast it's unsettling. Apparently all it takes is a few lines of dialogue. Oh, yes, and there's a missing father too of course! Gee, I'd never seen that before...only in every other book I've read in the past two years with a female lead. Can books please find other ways to convey strained relationships with parents? Fortunately, it's not a major point in the plot.
Still, I enjoy books that detail characters going through their life and growing as people. Pupcakes does a good job of mirroring real life character development. If you like that kind of thing, you'll enjoy Pupcakes for sure. Readers who are looking for deep literature with lots of thought-provoking questions should look elsewhere. Hallmark fans, on the other hand, will be right at home here. The book's Goodreads audience, who primarily fall in that camp, has given it many strong ratings. As for my perspective? It needed more conflict and it was a little too sappy at times. Still, it's a relatively enjoyable, cozy story and I don't regret reading it.
No comments:
Post a Comment