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My Review:Title: Salt and Sugar
Author: Rebecca Carvalho
Published by: Inkyard Press
Release Date: November 1, 2022
Format: ebook
Pages: 304
Genres: Contemporary, Retelling, Young Adult, Coming of Age
Source: Overdrive
Reading Challenges: Lenoreo's 2023 COYER Chapter 1, Lenoreo's 2023 Diversity Reading Challenge
Find it: Goodreads ✩ Amazon ✩ B&N ✩ Google ✩ Kobo ✩ iBooks ✩ IndieBound ✩ Book Depository
My rating:
Blurb:The grandchildren of two rival Brazilian bakeries fall in love despite their families’ feud in this delicious debut rom-com perfect for fans of Nicola Yoon and Gloria Chao.
Trust neither thin-bottomed frying pans nor Molinas.
Lari Ramires has always known this to be true. In Olinda, Brazil, her family’s bakery, Salt, has been at war with the Molinas’ bakery across the street, Sugar, for generations. But Lari’s world turns upside down when her beloved grandmother passes away. On top of that, a big supermarket chain has moved to town, forcing many of the small businesses to close.
Determined to protect her home, Lari does the unthinkable—she works together with Pedro Molina to save both of their bakeries. Lari realizes she might not know Pedro as well as she thought—and she maybe even likes what she learns—but the question remains: Can a Ramires and a Molina truly trust one another?
3.5 stars — This one started off super flat for me. Honestly, if it wasn’t a book club book and I wasn’t buddy reading, I would have DNFd and moved on to something else.
I don’t really read MG books, but this one definitely read more like MG than YA for me. The characterizations were flatter, the emotions were kind of over the top, that kind of thing. I’d say the majority of the first half of the book left me pretty frustrated. The characters, especially the adult characters, felt like caricatures instead of real people. But maybe that’s to show from a young person’s skewed perspective? I’m not sure…they were all very immature in the feud, I was missing some subtleties.
When Lari joins the cooking club, things start to get a bit better. The other kids in the club were all fun and interesting and kind. Even though she locked horns with Pedro, I liked seeing what they were doing with the food. We even got to see a few adults that weren’t “everything is black and white”.
I will admit that Lari still frustrated me with some of her decisions, but she did show some growth in the second half of the book, so it definitely settled in better for me. I appreciated the cute romance between Pedro and Lari, though moreso their slow realizations that the other person (family) wasn’t what they’d been led to believe.
We also finally got to see some growth between the kids and their parents, and it wasn’t entirely unrealistic (there were still set backs and things to work on). And learning some of the history helped to understand the emotions underwriting all of it.
I think this would be a great book for actual young adults, just might be hit or miss with adults who read young adult… Loved seeing a different country/culture, and while I avoided looking up all the foods, that was self-preservation so I didn’t get even more hungry. 😛
COYER Community: I buddy read this book with Lillian, Melissa and Kristen. We all agreed with the slow and young start, and in the end Melissa rated it 2.5 while Kristen and Lillian both rated it 3.5 rounded up (Lillian’s review, Melissa’s review, and Kristen’s review).
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