Title: Fake It Till You Bake It
Author: Jamie Wesley
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Publication date: June 21st, 2022
336 pages
3/5 stars
Goodreads Synopsis
A reality star and a cupcake-baking football player pretend to be a couple in order to save his bakery in this sweet and sexy romance from Jamie Wesley, Fake It Till You Bake It.
Jada Townsend-Matthews is the most reviled woman in America after turning down a proposal on a reality dating show. When she comes home to lick her wounds, Jada finds herself working at San Diego’s newest cupcake bakery, Sugar Blitz, alongside the uptight owner and professional football player Donovan Dell.
When a reporter mistakenly believes Jada and Donovan are an item, they realize they can use the misunderstanding to their advantage to help the struggling bakery and rehabilitate Jada’s image. Faking a relationship should be simple, but sometimes love is the most unexpected ingredient.
Fake it Till You Bake It is a sweet confection of a novel, the perfect story to curl up with and enjoy with a cupcake on the side.
Review
Fake dating and baking has been done well before and I’ve loved it enough to read it over and over again. But there was something big missing in this book for it to be a favorite of mine. I liked the main characters, especially the MMC, and the meet cute where she was criticizing the cupcakes was adorable and compelling. The FMC is more ditzy seeming than maybe necessary, but she is the heart of gold woman who has been misjudged by America. All pieces that generally would come together to equal a romance book that I love.
But. I really did not enjoy the conflict at the end. Yes, there is always going to be a conflict before the HEA in romance and I never “like” it because it’s negative, right? But this conflict irked my soul and it seemed so far fetched and there were much better options that could have been used. Just my opinion. It somewhat ruined my experience with this book and left it on a less positive note for me.
This is not to say that I won’t read this author again, it just means it didn’t work 100% for me and that’s okay. I hope everyone else who reads this really loves it for the positives (the FMCs grandmother for one).
Thank you to St. Martin’s Press and Netgalley for an early copy in exchange for an honest review.
Happy reading, folks!
Baltimore Bibliophile 