Tuesday 8 December 2015

Read in 2015 - 35: The Cake Shop in the Garden

This was the second time I read something by Carole Matthews. Re-reading my review for "The Only Way Is Up" confirmed my overall feeling about the "Cake Shop": A nice, harmless read, but (sorry!) nothing I'd spend my money on or would actively go looking for.
The book was a hand-me-down from my mother-in-law, and I can see why she enjoyed it. Nothing challenging, a not-too-big set of clearly defined characters and a plot easy to follow.

What is it about? 
Fay lives in a beautiful if somewhat run-down house by the canal, caring for her elderly mother and making ends meet by having established a cake shop and café in her garden. Her father died years ago and her younger sister lives in New York and never comes home. Her days are filled with baking, working the shop and café (constantly interrupted by her very demanding mother upstairs) and spending quiet evenings home, sometimes joined by Anthony, her partner of 10 years who comes across as a rather stiff, middle-aged bore.

It looks as if Fay's life is firmly set in these routines for the foreseeable future. But then things begin to happen that make sure nothing is going to be the same ever again:

A stranger moors his narrowboat on the canal behind the house and asks for temporary work. The health of Fay's mother takes a turn for the worse. Her sister comes visiting. Anthony has a new member joining his handbell-ringing team. Fay finds out something about herself she never suspected, and her whole life as she knew it up to then comes crashing and tumbling around her.
What will she do - and who with? Where does her loyal if rough employee at the cake shop, a Latvian girl named Lija, come into play?

The overall plot was foreseeable. From the first moment a certain character is introduced, it is clear that this is who Fay will end up with. But some things happen that offer a little suspense here and there, enough to keep me reading on so that I could find out what happened next.

Although every character was fleshed out with enough detail, I felt rather indifferent about them - actually, I mainly wanted to know whether I was right in assuming where the story was heading (I was).

All in all, a cosy, light read with enough drama to make it not boring, but not so much so as to lose any sleep.

14 comments:

  1. I'll have to write a bad review for the terrible book my book club chose for Christmas. It's called The Christmas Pearl by Dorothea Benton Frank and it's simply awful! There's a reason I never read any DBF until now, and this book only confirmed my belief that her books wouldn't appeal to me. She's a local Southern author and the main character in The Christmas Pearl was the ghost of an old African American housekeeper for a rich family that was like a caricature of Mammy from Gone with the Wind. It was kind of embarrassing.

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    1. Can't say I've ever heard of Dorothea Benton Frank, and what you say makes me think I rather not try and find out for myself :-)

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  2. OH! I just remembered something! When I was in England, I meant to look for that book that was written about the English canals, do you know the one I mean? You wrote a review of it and I tried to buy it here but it is only available in Europe, I think.

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    1. Are you sure I reviewed a book about the English canals, Kay? I have just used the search function for my blog (top left corner) and couldn't find anything. I've shown pictures of the canal in Ripon several times, but that's about it. You probably read such a review on someone else's blog... I can't remember having read a book about the canals in this country, sorry.

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    2. I know I worded that WRONGLY, ha ha! I remember a book about a houseboat on a canal in England? Was it a mystery? I can't remember, but I fully expected to have Richard get it for me from a book store only to find it was not available for purchase here! And I did think it was from your blog but then, I could have that all WRONGLY! :-)

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    3. This book is about a bunch of people living on house boats:
      http://librarianwithsecrets.blogspot.de/2013/07/read-in-2013-26-cuckoos-of-batch-magna.html
      In the past years, I have read a few books (fiction) where people live on river boats or undertake Long journeys by boat or ship. If you type "boat" in the search box of my blog, you should find them all - I still don't know which one you mean :-)

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    4. Yes! That is the one, "Cuckoos of Batch Magna"! I couldn't remember it!
      I have now been to England TWICE since I read your review and both times I have forgotten about it. I could have ordered it from Amazon.co.uk and gotten it while I was there. Oh well. Maybe next time! :-)

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    5. I am sure it can be arranged that you get this book, Kay. But you know it is fiction, so don't be disappointed :-)

      By the way, I have now added the solution to the 3rd question in a comment to my "Puzzles and Riddles" post.

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  3. And I still don't know the answer about the apples/oranges from your last post, will you tell us soon?

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    1. I didn't think anyone would want to know the solution, as so few people seemed to be interested in that post in the first place ;-)
      But I should have known you'd like to know - you are one of those people who, like me, love learning and finding out things!

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  4. This sounds like my kind of book....cakes!!!:) You won't believe it but here in our town we don't get English books, or French for that matter. A few days ago my daughter and I went to Palermo and we came back with 10 books, all in English!

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    1. Yes, cakes, sandwiches and home-made soups feature a lot in this book :-)
      During my last visit to Sicily (late 1990s), while staying with a friend in the Catania area, we went to a book fair that had many exhibitors from the UK. It was interesting to see how popular books in English were with the Catanese.

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  5. Somehow the very cover and title of that book does not tempt me. Come to think of it, I don't think I ever was a huge fan of novels focusing too much on food.

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    1. Well, it fits the story, so I didn't mind the focus on food. It was more on a general level that I didn't really warm to the characters or the plot.

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