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A review by lezreadalot
From Scratch by Katrina Jackson
3.0
Mary had long since accepted that her life was not a romcom, or a straight romance. It was a pure, unadulterated, comedy, a farce to be exact.
This was sweet, for sure, but I don't really feel too strongly about it. I love reading poly romance, but this went by so quickly I can't really call it satisfying. It's definitely tropey in all the right ways (professor quits her job, moves to a small town to become a baker, shacks up with the local police chief and fire chief, men who've been friends for years) but I wanted more. When I read a romance novella, I'm prepared for insta-love or insta-lust, but the speed at which this relationship moved was super fast, even keeping that in mind. Which was all well and good, because their chemistry was absolutely everything and they had fun banter and I was really rooting for them, but the way we sprinted to declarations of love did nothing for me. The conflict came literally out of nowhere. We don't learn anything about our characters' pasts organically; everything is just dumped on us in blocks of text. The prose has a very casual, almost conversational style, and it didn't exactly not work? But I'm not sure how much I liked it. It might just be a case of me needing to get used to it; this is my first work by this author. But I really came out of this feeling like we only had a very superficial understanding of the characters (even considering that this is a novella!) and caring more about the concept of this throuple rather than the relationship itself.
But, I mean, I did really like all of our characters, and this was sexy as heck. The main character is fat and black and thriving and I was always cheering for her. The humour didn't always work for me, but when it did, it was pretty amusing. A lot of my issues with this would probably be cleared up with more thorough editing (this is just a nitpick, but there were so many questions in dialogue where a question mark wasn't actually used, and it was driving me up a wall, haha). I've been meaning to try this author for a while, and I'm glad I did! I'll definitely try at least one more book in this series.
Content warnings: