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Overview
A delicious novel about the power of love-and dessert-by the national bestselling author.
Betty Mueller believed she did right by secretly ending her daughter Julie's relationship with Michael Slayton, a wild, older neighborhood heartthrob. Twenty years later, Betty has come to realize her mistake. Workaholic Julie is now the single mom of a teenager-and Michael, the one man who could make her happy, has been out of her life for the past two decades.
Determined to make amends, Betty schemes to reunite the couple in a dessert class. And with the love of her mother and daughter, her own determination, and lots of chocolate, Julie's chance for romance is all the higher...
Synopsis
A delicious novel about the power of love-and dessert-by the national bestselling author.
Betty Mueller believed she did right by secretly ending her daughter Julie's relationship with Michael Slayton, a wild, older neighborhood heartthrob. Twenty years later, Betty has come to realize her mistake. Workaholic Julie is now the single mom of a teenager-and Michael, the one man who could make her happy, has been out of her life for the past two decades.
Determined to make amends, Betty schemes to reunite the couple in a dessert class. And with the love of her mother and daughter, her own determination, and lots of chocolate, Julie's chance for romance is all the higher...
Romance Reviews Today
Top-notch storytelling . . . a warm-hearted tale that will bring tremendous amounts of laughter, but also a catch in your throat.
Editorials
Entertainment Weekly
The romantic insights . . . ring true.Flint Journal
Perfect, light, summer fare. . . . Challenges the limitations unmarried women regularly face while maintaining a tight tone and humorous voice.Romance Reviews Today
Top-notch storytelling . . . a warm-hearted tale that will bring tremendous amounts of laughter, but also a catch in your throat.Publishers Weekly
A second chance at love for 40-something Boston TV reporter Julie Mueller, a single mom to a teenaged daughter, means disrupting life living above her parents in suburban Watertown, Mass. Julie's mother, cancer-survivor Betty, regrets her disapproval of Julie's first love, Michael Slayton-or so Julie suspects. With Betty's prodding, she packs herself off to the cooking school dessert course of renowned French chef Renée D'Ours, and finds that Michael, freshly returned from Washington, D.C., with a divorce in hand, is also attending. Despite the stock setup, Strohmeyer pulls off a memorable menu of believable relationship courses, seasoned with angst and humor. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Washington Post Book World
Laugh-out-loud funny.Library Journal
Julie Mueller, an over-40 TV reporter, is finally up for a promotion to the national news, but because youth is favored in her profession over experience, the job might go to her younger coworker. Julie's personal life is as filled with drama as her professional life. Her elderly mother, Elizabeth, tries to undo a past mistake by reuniting Julie with Michael, the man from whom she steered her daughter away 20 years earlier. Elizabeth has arranged for Julie and Michael to attend a series of cooking classes together, and though the two have been feuding for years because of an exposé Julie did on Michael's former boss, when they meet in class, it's clear they still have feelings for each other. Not everything ends happily for Julie as she deals with her mother's failing health, the demands of her teenage daughter, and finding a lump in her breast, but the story ends well enough. This fast-paced novel, Strohmeyer's fourth outside of the Bubbles mystery series, features an accessible protagonist faced at turns with some of the saddest and most lighthearted situations life has to offer. Recommended for all public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ2/1/08.]
—Karen Core