This week’s BotW is Carole Matthew’s latest – The Cake Shop in the Garden. Last week was a heavy detective fiction week, and as my highest rated book on Goodreads was the second Peter Grant book and it’s only a couple of weeks since the first was my BotW, I thought a fun summer read should be my Book of the Week.
Fay runs a cake shop from her garden, next to the canal near Milton Keynes. Her mum is difficult and cantankerous and her sister is thousands of miles away in New York, getting up to antics her mum isn’t meant to know about. Then Danny Wilde arrives at the bottom of the garden on his boat and she starts to question her decisions. When tragedy strikes, it looks like everything is going to change. Will Fay have the courage to make the decision that’s right for her?
This is a fun, romantic summer read which is set not far from where I live (which I’ll admit added to the attraction of the book for me). I thought it was well set up and the plot worked really well – with a few twists that I wasn’t expecting. The only downside for me is that I found myself wanting to give Fay a shake sometimes and tell her to man up and stand up for herself. But I know that that’s easier said than done, particularly in the situation that she found herself in. I was happy with the resolution – although I was worried for a while that I wasn’t going to get the ending that I wanted.
So, another week, another great book for your holiday*. OK the Costa del Keynes (as Matthews calls it) isn’t quite as hot as a beach in the Med, but I think this might be the perfect for a staycation in the UK – I can see people reading this on canalboat holidays or on the beach in Devon. It’s not my favourite of Matthews books – that title still belongs to Welcome to the Real World – but this is a good page-turner.
The Cake Shop in the Garden should be fairly easy to get hold of – the paperback came out in April** – but here are some links to Amazon, Waterstones, Foyles, Kindle and Kobo incase you can’t wait to go to a real shop.
* I promise the summer reads post is coming. Soon. Before August starts. There’s just a couple more books I want to read first…
**My copy came from NetGalley to coincide with that, but as usual, I’m behind on the NetGalley list. Also, insert usual honest review disclaimer here.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 