A review by liralen
All You Knead Is Love by Tanya Guerrero

4.0

Nice balance of serious and lighter here: Alba is freshly in Barcelona, having been sent to stay with her grandmother while her mother figures out what to do about her relationship with Alba's abusive father. Barcelona is full of unknowns for Alba, starting with the fact that, suddenly, the people in her life seem happy to have her there. Gradually, she starts to find her place—one loaf of bread at a time.

I love seeing books set in non-English-speaking places, written for an English-speaking audience—it's just a little taste of somewhere else. I'd have liked to see more of Barcelona in here (Alba spends most of her time in her grandmother's neighbourhood), as it's somewhere I've never been and I love me some vicarious travel. But I'm thrilled with the minimal nod paid to romance.

Spoiler

I was worried that Alba's mother would, when she came to Spain, immediately get together with Toni, her childhood friend—but it's very clearly a 'we were basically siblings as children and romance is not on the table'—and although Alba has a little romance of her own, it doesn't get far before she decides that there's a bit too much going on at the moment and she's not in a place to start something. Very nice to see.

I'm not sure how realistic it is for Toni to pick up gluten-free baking as a marketing scheme (gluten-free is a whole different ball game and would require a lot of experimentation and know-how, even knowing how to bake with gluten; also, a gluten-free loaf at a gluten-filled bakery will be fine for many but not for people with certain severe kinds of gluten intolerances), but I can get behind Alba's growing interest in bread and the bakery.