Title: Sweet Talk Series: Bakery Sisters #1
Author: Susan Mallery
Published: June 24, 2008
Genre(s): Romance: Contemporary
Page Count: 376
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Is there anything sweeter than first love?
Don't ask Claire Keyes. The twenty-eight-year-old piano prodigy has never had a regular boyfriend, much less a real romance. Her music career has left little room for friends or family—which is just part of the reason she hasn't seen the family bakery or her two sisters in years.
But now Nicole is sick, and Jesse is AWOL. Despite the fact that Claire can't boil water, she's determined to play caretaker. Connecting with her sisters tops her to-do list…along with falling in love, or at least in lust, for the first time.
Ruggedly sexy Wyatt just might fit the bill. Although he keeps saying that he and Claire come from entirely different worlds, he lights up hotter than a bakery oven whenever Claire is near. If this keeps up, she just might sweet—talk him into her bed…and her life.
I’m iffy on this for sure. Sweet Talk started off as a different, emotional homecoming story featuring sisters who pretty much hate each other but once we got to working on the romance, the book descended into irredeemably cheesy made-for-TV territory that I really wasn’t a fan of. Compared to most of the romance I’ve read, I would hesitate to call this good quality.
Claire Keyes as a world-famous concert pianist. A child prodigy who was discovered as a toddler, she’s never had the chance for a life beyond rehearsal, travel, performance, repeat. She gets a call that her twin sister is having surgery and will need help with the recuperation process, and, wanting desperately to reconnect with her family, she flies home without a second’s thought. Except it turns out her twin, Nicole, still hates her guts.
The animosity the other characters felt for Claire was extremely surprising for me. Normally in contemporary romance type books, siblings are super buddy-buddy with cute banter and stuff. That was so not the case with Sweet Talk. Nicole hates Claire, she plays the victim, blames everything crappy on her life on a sister who only partially deserves it. Not that Claire is perfect; she’s not. But she’s definitely being unfairly treated by both of her sisters, and also by Wyatt, her love interest, who’s heard only bad things about her for years.
And when Wyatt comes in, we start to have problems. Initially, the romance was very nice, and I thought it was cute. But then in the second half, Mallery just started throwing these weird tensions and obstacles into the mix that felt entirely off-track. They just didn’t fit. Everything got so dramatic and blown out of proportion. By the end of it all, I no longer really liked Wyatt, and I was starting to get iffy on Claire as well.
Sweet Talk is also extremely cheesy/corny/sappy/cliché, what have you. This just didn’t seem like a real story. It was too dramatic, the dialogue was too telenovela, the conclusion too perfect. I didn’t buy any of it, and felt miffed, since the book had started off so promisingly.
Based on the sister dynamics, this book is an excellent piece of fiction, and I really enjoyed what Susan Mallery did with it. Everything else was either bad or suspect. Sweet Talk succeeds as a story about estranged sisters, but fails in most other respects. So, overall, I’m iffy.
