Mini Reviews: Little Beach Street Bakery series by Jenny Colgan

Little Beach Street Bakery (Little Beach Street Bakery #1) by Jenny Colgan

Blurb from Goodreads:

Polly Waterford is recovering from a toxic relationship. Unable to afford their flat, she has to move miles away from everyone, to a sleepy little seaside resort in Cornwall, where she lives alone above an abandoned shop. And so Polly takes out her frustrations on her favourite hobby: making bread.

But what was previously a weekend diversion suddenly becomes far more important as she pours her emotions into kneading and pounding the dough, and each loaf becomes better and better. With nuts and seeds, olives and chorizo, with local honey (courtesy of local bee keeper, Huckle), and with reserves of determination and creativity Polly never knew she had, she bakes and bakes and bakes.... And people start to hear about it. Sometimes, bread really is life...and Polly is about to reclaim hers.

My Review:
 

This was a cute read -- I loved the setting and the new beginning aspect of it.  Polly was very likable and I rooted for her to find herself and do well throughout the book.  And, of course, the baking!  The turn this takes definitely isn't predictable and I liked that the focus was as much on Polly as it was on her romantic life.  This was very British (I lived in England for two years) and I would definitely recommend to fans of  Jane Green, Sophie Kinsella, Marian Keyes, Jill Mansell and Katie Fforde (my favorite of these)!!

Polly didn't know how long the kiss lasted.  She didn't know where she was or what she was doing, only that he whole body jumped as if she'd been given an electric shock as soon as their lips met; that instantly, without even thinking about it, she was responding to him., her whole being concentrated on their mouths and their hands and her desperate, sudden urge to press herself to him, to be close to him, to be under his shirt and against his skin, burying her fact in his chest and breathing in the heady sweet scent of him.  She felt greedy, abandoned, completely oblivious to the other people there.

Summer at Little Beach Street Bakery (Little Beach Street Bakery #2) by Jenny Colgan

Blurb from Goodreads:

Summer has arrived in the Cornish town of Mount Polbearne and Polly Waterford couldn't be happier. Because Polly is in love: she's in love with the beautiful seaside town she calls home, she's in love with running the bakery on Beach Street, and she's in love with her boyfriend, Huckle.

And yet there's something unsettling about the gentle summer breeze that's floating through town. Selina, recently widowed, hopes that moving to Mount Polbearne will ease her grief, but Polly has a secret that could destroy her friend's fragile recovery. Responsibilities that Huckle thought he'd left behind are back and Polly finds it hard to cope with his increasingly long periods of absence.

Polly sifts flour, kneads dough and bakes bread, but nothing can calm the storm she knows is coming: is Polly about to lose everything she loves?

The second book in this series or, really, the sequel to the first book (I do not believe there will be any more) wasn't as successful as the first one.  I don't generally post DNF reviews but I am posting this one because of the dichotomy between the first and second books.  The overarching thing I can say about book #2 is that there was no point -- the author should have stopped at book #1.  It wasn't as if book #1 ended with a cliffhanger -- it had an ending that was solid and the story should have stopped then.  What really bothered me was the constant everything falling apart at once -- it seemed like unreasonable and unnecessary conflict rather than the organic and unique conflict of the first book in which I wanted things to work out.  In this book, I didn't care.  This sequel, Summer at Little Beach Street Bakery, comes out in the U.S. today, March 22, 2016.