CLICK TO PURCHASE From the publisher: A tantalizing novel about a struggling chocolatier who is granted a magical vision of the future of her dreams, only to realize that her heart may desire something else entirely, from the bestselling author of The Magic of Lemon Drop Pie. Paris trained chocolatier and single mother Emmie Wynne gave up her own dreams six years ago when she returned to her Pacific Northwest coastal tourist town to run her family's struggling candy store.

My Review: As Julia Child once said, "Find something you're passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it." Her best (fictional) friend, Tabitha Knight, seems to have followed Child’s advice...

My Review: Five years hasn’t been nearly enough time for Parisians to heal from the devastation of World War II and the brutal occupation of their city and country by the Nazis. As this fourth story in the American in Paris series begins, American expat Tabitha Knight hopes that the re-opening of her messieurs’ restaurant, Maison de Verre, is at least a sign that the healing has begun. Or that at least it heals something for her beloved grand-père and his life partner ‘Oncle’ Rafe, as well as the gang of their old colleagues from the Resistance who are gathering to celebrate their new but well-loved and well-remembered old haunt.

CLICK TO PURCHASE From the publisher: A magical cookbook and a summer on her family’s Italian olive farm help a brokenhearted social media chef cook up a satisfying new life in this delectable novel from the bestselling author of Recipe for a Charmed Life. Rising star Jules Costa loves re-creating vintage recipes for her popular online cooking show. But when personal and professional disaster strikes, her only chance to save her career is to complete her new cookbook before the end of the summer.

My Review: I fell in love with this series with the very first book, The Kamogawa Food Detectives, and now I’m utterly hooked on both the series AND the reading niche it occupies. By that, I mean the genre that was popularized by Before the Coffee Gets Cold of loosely connected slice-of-life stories centered around a cozy location that use that location and its function as a framing device to tell slightly bittersweet, often sadly fluffy stories with or without a hint of magic or magical realism.

My Review: There are no actual funerals in this book, only metaphorical ones. Considering the state of most of the clients of the Ex-Boyfriend’s Favorite Recipe Funeral Committee, if there actually WERE funerals, there would be a LOT of them, the recently deceased would probably have died in some gruesome way, and this would be an entirely different kind of book.

My Review: “Death by Chocolate” is a common dessert on restaurant menus - one I’ll never look at it the same way again after reading this book in spite of how much I really do love chocolate. Because this one begins with a literal death by chocolate, as chefs start dropping dead in the middle of filming the latest episode of a hit celebrity chef competition, …