I'm all for the idea of this plot - baker's son wants to break away from a future of spending his whole life working in his dad's bakery, falls in love with a new-man-in-town who is a strong, responsible, hard-working, good person - but it falls apart because the baker's son is weak, pathetic and insufferable. He's like a child - and not a happy child! A depressed, needy child prone to crying jags. He hangs around shitty people who say shitty things and doesn't stand up for himself or others. There's literally NOTHING attractive about Ari's sniveling personality. Literally the only reason I can see for Hector "loving" or "caring about" Ari is because he thinks that Ari is handsome or has a good body. You should think the two people falling in love are cute, good people, and deserve each other. That's not how you should feel when reading a romance. When they finally kiss, I'm like, "NOoooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!! Don't kiss him, Hector!!!!!!!" And that's bad. And I'm supposed to think Hector falls in love with him!!!! What frustrated me is that Ari, the character who is working in his dad's bakery, is a selfish, self-absorbed, whiny, immature, pouting little brat.
Although nothing romantic really happens until about two-thirds of the way through the book. Ostensibly this is a romance between two young men (18 or 19?). If you like any of the elements I mentioned earlier, though, it's worth the read. This book was definitely beautiful and had cute and meaningful moments, but I just feel like I've read it before. I think the struggle was realistic for Ari to not know what he wanted to do with his life, but that subplot almost seems unsolved by the end of this? Those moments were just frustrating for me, and I don't feel like we got to see enough of him growing out of that before the book ended. Also, Ari irritated me for most of the book, even though I know he was purposefully characterized as sensitive and sort of passive. It felt pretty formulaic and stereotypical, so I was never really shocked or emotional at anything that happened. Small town, summer, slow burn romance, family drama, a mistake that leads to more family drama and a breakup, then they make up. I saw so many glowing reviews for this that I basically harrassed my library into buying a copy, but I'm sad that my lasting impression of it is that is was just kinda average? There were certainly things I loved about it like the character development and the setting at a bakery and the gorgeous art style and how Hector would call Ari out when he was being a baby or manipulative, but I thought the rest of the plot was just kinda typical.
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