Jessica and Edward have bought the Cotswold tea room from her mum. With their first baby due in less than a month Jessica is keen to make it their own and decides to offer a range of Artisan breads. With no experience of baking and little time to practise her first attempt does not go well.
Her mum and sister, Marie, are a little worried that Jessica has not started preparing for the arrival of the baby – she hasn’t even bought a cot. However, Jessica is determined to get this new aspect to their business up and running before the baby arrives.
"The story (what I read of it) was entertaining, and the dilemma is so small-town to be delightful. It just needs an editor very, very, badly."
Reviewer: Reader for Bookangel.
I really wanted to like this book, and I am biased towards it as problems with a Cotswold tearoom sounds so quintessentially British.
Sadly, there are missing words and comma abuse throughout the first page. For example, "When baby finally arrived" is missing a 'the'. "and even better to sharing it" is missing a 'be'. Several sentences use commas where full stops would be better, as the section after the comma is about something different.
There are also impressively run on sentences: "She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, she definitely wasn't one of those elegantly pregnant women, more of a mother duck, she sighed as she walked down the stairs." Changing the first comma to a full stop would make the rest of the sentence make more sense, although it could be better phrased. If I was being picky there are other things I could bring up, but they are just annoying enough to stop me getting into the story as I had to stop to re-parse sentences. I gave up on loc 212 when a misplaced comma and run on sentence left her crumbling her morning sickness into the bread. I think it was meant to be yeast, but I'm not sure since the last thing the sentence refered to was her heaving. I skimmed the rest of the book.
I say this sincerely and with no ill-intent but please get an editor or proof-reader. The ideas are good, the story (what I read of it) entertaining, and the dilemma: whether to introduce artisan bread to an establishe tearoom thus Changing Things from The Way They Are (Horrors!) is so small-town to be delightful. It just needs a polish to be great. Rating:DNF
