Title: Don't Call Me Cupcake Series: Holloway Girls #1
Author: Tara Sheets
Published: April 24, 2018
Genre(s): Romance: Contemporary
Page Count: 277
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Most families have a favorite recipe or two, handed down through generations. The Holloway women are a little different. Emma Holloway, like her grandmother before her, bakes wishes into her delicious cupcakes, granting the recipient comfort, sweet dreams, or any number of good things. It's a strange gift, but it brings only happiness. Until gorgeous, smooth-talking newcomer Hunter Kane strolls into her shop, Fairy Cakes—and Emma makes the mistake of selling him not one, but three Sweet Success cupcakes.
Hunter, it turns out, is opening a fancy new restaurant and bakery right on the waterfront--Emma's competition. To make matters worse, the town committee has decided to split the upcoming summer festival contract between the two, forcing Emma to work with her nemesis. But she can't afford to split her profits. The solution: create a recipe that will make Hunter leave town permanently.
The Holloway charms are powerful. But there are other kinds of magic in the world—like red-hot first kisses, secret glances, and the feeling that comes with falling truly, madly, inconveniently in love . . .
Magical realism in a traditional genre romance? I’d never seen it before, but you can bet that I added Tara Sheets’ debut novel to my to-read list as soon as I heard about it. This is really and truly as if Sarah Addison Allen started writing genre romances instead of romance-adjacent women’s fiction—which I honestly also enjoy, no shade intended. If that’s your thing, then you’re in luck!
Taking place on a small island off the coast of Washington, this book is full of the usual small town charm that many readers of contemporary romance love. Quaint shops, nosy neighbors, and a friendly, down-to-earth vibe suffuse the first few chapters of Don’t Call Me Cupcake. Then you meet the female protagonist, Emma, who owns a struggling bakery on the waterfront. She sells cupcakes, but these are special cupcakes! (No, not like Special Brownies.) These sweet treats are baked with charms that create subtle, magical effects in those who eat them: a good night’s sleep, a confidence boost, etc. The hero, Hunter, is a big city dude with a massive ego, and Sheets perfectly sets up an enemies-to-lovers trope. Everything’s set, and I was ready to go. Overall, the first half of the book seems cute and light and breezy, just the right kind of book for lazy weekends or rainy afternoons.
Except…
Tara Sheets writes as if she hates women.
Truly, I would have liked Don’t Call Me Cupcake had it not been for the author’s absolutely unchecked misogyny, which emerges in the second half of the novel. With a vengeance. As ever: if you have to tear other women down in order to build your protagonist up, you’re not doing a great job writing.
Heroine Emma is pitted against a legion of the town’s local “slutty women” in competition for Hero Hunter’s attention and love. These woman are the same Mean Girls who bullied Emma in high school, and they’ve now morphed into makeup obsessed sexual predators. Yikes! Casting women as adversaries in this way, where they’re literally fighting over some useless whitebread he-man, is so reductive. This is how Tara Sheets views women. Not to mention that Hunter’s Evil Ex is evil because: (1) she really wanted to succeed in her job as a corporate attorney; and (2) she got accidentally pregnant and had an abortion.
So the message there is what, exactly? It’s bad to be career focused as a woman? (Especially a lawyer: those are always villainous.) And also, it’s bad to make responsible choices about your own uterus—better to just gestate and raise a kid you never even wanted because that’s more “womanly”? And if you like makeup and a good orgasm, keep that locked down so you don’t scare men off? Give me a fucking break.
Check out the scene, in which Emma and her cousin, Juliette, are discussing one of the Evil Women:
“I bet Hunter is already slipping in a puddle of Bethany’s drool right now,” Juliette said, snapping Emma’s attention, mid-mantra.
A shriek of laughter pierced the air and Juliette groaned. “There she is, Madame Boobs-a-Lot.” Another ear-piercing shriek. “Singing the song of her people.”
Bethany Andrews was chatting with Hunter near the bar. She wore a lime green wrap dress that showcased her impressive cleavage and perfect tan. Surrounding them were a few of Bethany’s minions, every one of them glued to whatever Hunter was saying.
And of course, against this backdrop of Bad Women is Emma, pure and simple and sweet. She’s beautiful without even trying. She’s ambitious but not aggressively so. Her only fault is that she’s so nice, she let her abusive ex-fiancé take advantage of her. Don’t Call Me Cupcake holds its heroine (and her cousin) up as the ideal of womanly virtue, and in the process puts down all other female characters. Implicitly, we as readers come to understand what kind of woman “deserves” a Happily Ever After, according to the author’s narrative.
The message? Don’t be sexual, don’t be ambitious, don’t provide for your own future.
The fact that this won a Golden Heart from RWA in 2016 is just another signal that the entire org needs to get tossed into the dumpster. This anti-woman hell is the best the romance genre has to offer?
Not likely.
The magical realism aspects were nice, though.
