Meet Me at the Cupcake Café

Jenny Colgan has become something of a treasure amongst those seeking a good chick lit read with heart. The popularity if her books having skyrocketed in recent years.

Meet Me At The Cupcake Cafe is some years old now but I hadn't found time to enjoy it and now I wonder what took me so long. The story of Issy, a thirty something singleton who finds herself out of work and with a passion for baking who decides to open her own cafe.

Colgan is somewhat of a master at writing novels which don't just have a small cast of interesting characters but whole communities of them and in the Cupcake Cafe we have such a colourful array of people we are introduced to and become emotionally invested in that it makes it a lovely read. They all weave in and out of the story so intricately.

Whilst romance forms part of the story it's not it's only focus which sometimes can be detrimental to novels of this genre. Instead it is a story of perseverance and friendships and community. A lovely read which was so well received Colgan wrote a follow up story entitled Christmas at the Cupcake Cafe which is lovely as Issy and her community of friends clearly have lots more stories to share.

This was a sweet book about a woman chasing her dreams. Issy gets let go from her real estate firm and decides to open a cupcake bakery, following in her grandfather's footsteps. (He owned and operated three bread bakeries in his prime.) The book follows Issy's troubles with opening the cafe, her romantic misadventures, and the slow decline of her beloved grandfather to dementia. Interspersed with the chapters are actual recipes, most in the form of letters written to Issy from her grandfather. And these recipes look DELICIOUS. I'm going to be writing a few of them down before I take this book back to the library!

The characters in the book are endearing, from Issy, to her acerbic flatmate Helena, to her employee Pearl and Pearl's adorable son, Louis. Really, the only unlikable character in the book is Issy's on-again, off-again douche of an ex, but he's meant to be the villain of the story. Even Pearl's erratic boyfriend is at least a nice sort. Set in London, there's a kind of timeless quality to the story, so when Issy mentioned Facebook I was a little taken aback - I had not even realized it was set in modern times! I was thinking 1970s or so.

The book has a sequel, but unfortunately the reviews are all quite bad for it. People who loved this book say the second did not hold true to the characters, so I probably will not read it. There was another book mentioned in the back of this one, The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris, that I may look into.

I love baking, so reading a book that centered on baking cakes, with recipes, was a lot of fun. From the sweet pink cover to the simple joy Issy takes in feeding sweets to people, I really loved this book.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.