I was excited to return to the world of the Donner Bakery since some of the other original books in the series had migrated into new offshoot series in the SmartyPants Romance Green Valley world. This author was new to me, although I do have one of her books as a freebie ebook. I was lucky enough to get the audiobook to listen to this one. Both narrators had good voices. However the way the female narrator said Green Valley sounded like “Grain Valley” a lot of the time, which kind of messed with me as I was listening since Grain Valley is a suburb of Kansas City where I live. Also occasionally the male narrator would emphasize certain phrases or words that seemed a little off or over the top at times.

The story itself was pretty good. I liked the way Julia would just run away from situations she didn’t like, I mean literally run away, lol. And there was a really good representation of a person with a genetic issue that caused a lifelong disability, one that I hadn’t really heard about before, with Julia’s love interest Shane. Shane’s musical ability was a neat one, and I enjoyed how both of them had their interest in baking. I would love to try some of the bread they talked about!

I did have some issues with what seemed to be a lot of use of cliches, some awkward dialogue at times, as well as occasionally too much unnecessary descriptions of things. I also didn’t feel the first sex scene fit perfectly. While I’m normally all about getting to the steamy scenes as soon as possible, something about the way this happened, or the way they reacted to each other during that scene was a bit wrong for me.

In the end however, the story was good, and makes a fair addition to the Donner Bakery series.