N.B. This review was published on a previous blog.
I got a free copy of Julia Gabriel’s Cupcakes & Chardonnay from Story Cartel. It’s a short novel, 128 pages long, which only took me a few hours to read. Still, those few hours of downtime were enjoyable.
The story is simple. It does not have any complex themes nor does it have cliffhangers and complicated plot twists. It isn’t very exciting, really. It is a straightforward story with a romantic plot. However, Gabriel made the characters seem real, as they have both positive and negative characteristics, which made me like them. Suzie Q, Daryle and Brent were likable characters, enough for me to stay until the end of the story.
The plot device is something that I am familiar with, as anyone with any experience in reading fanfiction and romance novels would be – multi-millionaire proposes a business deal to hardworking, beautiful woman. What made Cupcakes & Chardonnay a pleasant read was not the “who, what and where,” but the “how and why”- Why Daryle needed to propose to Suzie Q. in the first place and why she needed to accept; how Daryle and Suzie finally realized that their arrangement could work and why it would.
There’s just one thing I thought it needed – a more detailed description of Daryle. After all, women readers need something to fantasize about imagine.
Overall, the book was an interesting material for light reading.