Sugarcoated by Erin Nicholas

Sugarcoated by Erin Nicholas

Narrated by Jason Clarke & Lili Valente

Sugarcoated is book one in Erin Nicholas’ Hot Cakes series, set in and around the small town of Appleby, Iowa. It’s a best friend’s little sister/brother’s best friend romance with a side of “I’m keeping a big secret from you”.

Zoe McCaffery is the owner/operator of Buttered Up, a bakery which was begun by Zoe’s grandmother, Letty, and then continued on by her mother, Maggie. Now it’s Zoe’s. The bakery has a reputation for being unchanging in the Appleby landscape – with Zoe sticking to tried and true recipes and rarely venturing into anything which could be termed innovative. She’s recently started making cake pops and her mother is not over it yet. Letty is probably rolling in her grave.

Aiden Anderson is Zoe’s brother Cam’s best friend. Aiden basically grew up with Zoe but about a year or so ago, Zoe started seeing Aiden in a different light. Zoe is 25 and still a virgin. She is fairly desperate to get rid of her v-card. Back at Christmas she “chose” Aiden to do the deed. Unfortunately, she didn’t exactly get Aiden’s buy-in to that plan. Things didn’t go well – Aiden turned her down and she hasn’t seen him in the five months since.

Aiden, for his part, did not want to turn Zoe down but as he lived, until the book starts at least, in Chicago, he did not want to start anything until he’d moved back to Appleby. He started seeing Zoe differently about two years prior and he’s decided that he and Zoe should be married. For the past five months he’s been advancing his plan (he didn’t tell Zoe about any of this of course) and now he’s back in town for its execution.

Hot Cakes is the name of a big snack cake company (think Hostess) based in Appleby. Aiden and his business partners have just bought it. (Oh, did I forget to say that Aiden’s a millionaire, having made bank on a computer game he and Cam designed?). The problem is that Hot Cakes was started by Didi Lancaster, the former business partner of Letty McCaffery. Didi used one of Letty’s recipes for the first Hot Cake and Letty never got over it. (Letty, like her daughter and granddaughter, did not cope with change well.) There has been a feud between the two families ever since – to the degree that Hot Cakes employees are strictly banned from buying from or going into Buttered Up. Appleby is reliant on the Hot Cakes factory for most of its employment so Aiden believes he’s doing a public service by buying the company – but exactly how he’s going to convince Zoe of that and get her to marry him is a bit of a challenge. His plan is to get Zoe “buttered up” first and then tell her.

I did not like either Zoe or Aiden at first. I thought it was very uncool of Zoe to turn up in Aiden’s bedroom (they share a house in Appleby because reasons), wearing only a teddy, to wake him from a sound sleep, expecting sex.

Aiden is dismayed to find that Zoe did not think of him as relationship material – merely that she thought of him as “safe” for her first time. She has no intention of marrying him – at least, not when he first gets back to town. Aiden’s plan and his confidence in achieving his goal was arrogant and did not endear him to me. Given they’d both annoyed me for the same reason, I did think they were perfect for each other though. I will say this: Consent matters people!!

After a somewhat bumpy start however, both Zoe and Aiden did grow on me. They are far more than some bad decisions canvassed in the early part of the story. Zoe needs to learn to adapt and take on new ideas – when it comes to Hot Cakes, Buttered Up and in how she sees Aiden – and Aiden has to learn that not everything he does will turn out perfectly and he can’t just ride in on a white horse and be the hero all the time – sometimes he’s got to compromise and communicate and eat some humble pie.

There is a fair bit of set up of the series – there are six books planned (so far) so the listener is introduced to most of the main players, including Aiden and his five business partners. It’s a thing that has to happen in a series like this but it’s also not relevant to the romance between the main characters so from time to time I found myself zoning out a little. There is also quite a bit about business, which was interesting sometimes and not so interesting other times.

The next book in the series features Jane, Zoe’s good friend, who works at Hot Cakes and has, for the past few years, been sneaking up to the back of Buttered Up for a morning muffin. It did not make sense to me that there was such conflict between Aiden and Zoe about Hot Cakes (the mere concept of them causes Zoe to go off) when she has no difficulty with her friendship with Jane. I had a bit of cognitive dissonance about the whole “feud” thing.

When Aiden and Zoe start actually hanging out, it does become obvious how good they are for each other and how they work as a couple and those parts of the book were my favourites. I did end up liking both main characters, which is quite something considering my early impression of them.

The narration was a bit of a mixed bag. Jason Clarke narrates the sections told from Aiden’s POV and Lili Valente performs Zoe’s. Jason Clarke’s narration was far superior. Were I to rate them separately I’d give him an A. He had a great range of character voices, excellent comedic timing, good pathos and I enjoyed his overall delivery very much.

Lili Valente’s narration was inconsistent, particularly as regards her pacing. There was quite a bit where she spoke too quickly. At first I thought maybe it was a problem with the audio file (I recently listened to a book which was perfect at 0.9x) but Jason Clarke’s sections were well-paced. To slow the audiobook down would have diminished his performance. Also, it was not all of Ms. Valente’s narration that was too fast, only most of it. The pauses between paragraphs and sentences were fine but in many (but not all) cases, the words themselves sounded too fast to me. I guess other listeners may not notice an issue but I struggled with it.

Otherwise, her character voices were good and she did well to render Zoe sympathetically. Were I to grade Ms. Valenti’s performance separately, I’d give her a B- or a C+. (So the narration averages to a B.)

I especially liked that each narrator had a different vocal tone for each of what will be the series main characters – albeit that the differences were subtle in some cases.

Sugarcoated turned out to be fairly fun and flirty and once I got over problems I had with the setup, I ended up enjoying it. It’s not the kind of book I’ll relisten to but it was certainly entertaining.

Kaetrin


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