Donut Fall in Love

Donut Fall in Love (2021) Jackie Lau

Ryan Kwok is worried that his latest movie is a flop.

This movie could be a major setback. Movies about guys like him weren’t allowed to flop. People would point at this single movie as proof that no more like it should be made.

He’s also dealing with the unexpected loss of his mother–and the difficult relationship he has with his father.

And that was a nice memory . . . but nice memories were painful now. Because they couldn’t make any more.

So he decided he needed a break before he said something he’d regret.

Someone had asked him a question about diversity, and he’d almost lost it. He was usually pretty good at giving smooth and sufficiently thoughtful answers, but he’d wanted to scream about how white people didn’t get asked these questions every damn time they did an interview.

But when an opportunity to do a brief stint on a baking show comes up, he decides to take it–although he is definitely going to take baking lessons.

Lindsay McLeod is delighted the bakery she runs with her best friend is a success. Maybe it’s been years since she’s dated–or made new friends–but that’s ok because the bakery is going great!

She felt like she couldn’t connect with anyone she hadn’t known for a long time, and she also couldn’t stand to form close relationships with people who hadn’t known her before, who only knew the after.

There are a surprising number of serious subjects going on in this book.

“Oh, I forgot to mention something about Harold.”

Please don’t tell me how good a kisser he is. Please.

“He’s Chinese.” That was actually quite surprising.

Lindsay’s mother was a bit of an Asian-hating Asian. It had taken a while for Lindsay to comprehend the extent of her mom’s internalized racism, but eventually it had become obvious.

I’d actually seen this one coming pretty early on, and it is one of the reasons I kept reading once the romance kicked up into a lot of boinking.

“She has an appointment with her doctor this afternoon because we think she has postpartum depression, so if you could make sure she gets to that, it would be great. I . . .” He trailed off.

I was happy that the boinking was very easy to skip–and I don’t feel like I missed any important discussions that happened during the sex scenes, so that was a plus. Yeah, there was a fair bit to skip, but it was easy to see the starts and ends to those bits.

And the baking was lovely!

“Why are there weights next to the volume measurements?” he asked.

“We measure by weight— it’s more accurate— but home bakers often don’t do that.”

It’s a pleasure to see baking stories told by people who actually love to bake (or at the very least know what they’re doing).

As noted, there are a lot of serious subjects here, but they were extremely well dealt with, and the overall mood leaned into the HEA. However, the romance was the weakest part of the story for me here, possibly because a a good deal of it leaned on the sexual attraction between the two, and that is almost never going to work forme. But everything else was really well done.

Publisher: Berkley

Rating: 7.5/10

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