Quick Stats:
Overall: 2 stars
Characters: 3/5
Plot: 2/5
Writing: 2/5
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Pitched as Jenny Han meets The Great British Baking Show, this book has Chinese-American culture, baking, romance, and drama. And it sounds great. In theory. In actuality, it fell flat.
The characters were somewhat of a redeeming quality. Mostly well-rounded and engaging, I did connect well to each character, with a few exceptions. The three main adult characters were flat, poorly written, lacked motivation, and were often childish. They didn’t speak or act like adults. Liza’s mom is a main driving force of the tension in the novel, but she lacked any motivation behind her actions, reacting unpredictably, and oftentimes oddly petty. Liza’s father was childish. He read like a teenage girl at some points. You could have changed his character to a younger sister and left all his lines and actions the same, and it might have made more sense. The final adult who played a role was Mrs. Lee. We don’t hear much from her until the end, but when we do, her dialogue comes off as awkward, flat, and insincere.
However, all of the teens—as well as Jeannie and Nathan—were well written. I loved Liza, Grace, Sarah, Ben, and even Edward. They all had obvious goals and motivations and were easy to connect with and care about. James was the only one who fell flat. He just seemed a carbon copy of every other broody love interest. Tall, dark, rich, and kind of a jerk. His one motivation was protecting Ben, which is nice, but the way and extent to which he does it is melodramatic, and he has no goals or motivation or personality of his own.

The plot was not great. It took much to long to get to the baking competition—which was the main redeeming part in my opinion. There were a lot of unnecessary scenes and content to get to that main part that really started the movement of the plot. A lot of those earlier scenes and information could have been condensed. I flew through the actual baking parts of the book. I found them very interesting and well done.
The middle of the book and the lead up to the climax felt like every page there was an obstacle thrown in the way of Liza and her friends, but it would be resolved within one to two pages. There was no time to build tension or develop potentially interesting plotlines. These road blocks were thrown in our face all of a sudden, and their solutions came out of the blue just as awkwardly. I would really have liked to see some of those plot points drawn out to build intrigue and tension. These lead the climax itself to be underwhelming. It didn’t get a chance to shine because I was still preoccupied by all the things that had flown at me out of left field in the previous chapters.
Honestly, the writing, plot, and pacing just screamed debut.

There were also issues with fat phobia and tokenized LBGTQ+ rep.

All in all, I wouldn’t recommend this book. If you’re looking for an own voices book by a Chinese-American author, there are many better ones out there—Gloria Chao’s or Abigail Hing Wen’s books for example.