The Cosy Croissant Café
by Jane LinfootSetting: England
Genres: Fiction / Romance / Romantic Comedy
Published on April 24, 2025
Pages: 400
Format: eARC Source: Netgalley
Don’t you just hate it when unpleasant guys strip off and they’re disgustingly tanned, toned and attractive under their clothes?
Facing down a shirtless Miles Appleton – best friend to her brother-in-law – Betty is reminded both of everything she dislikes about the talented pastry chef, and how annoyingly gorgeous he is. Boathouse Cottage was meant to be a sanctuary for Betty and her beloved rescue Shetland Pony, Pumpkin, but it seems Fate isn’t done messing with her just yet...
Now, as her sister’s marriage implodes and the family cottage in St Aiden becomes a bargaining chip that needs to be protected, Betty and Miles go head to head. Miles's baking experiments may have produced the best thing Betty’s ever tasted – but she can’t afford to be swayed by his delicious croissant campaign.
Or can she? Because as Betty soon realises, there might be more to gain from aligning with the talented baker than fighting against the temptation he and his pastries pose...
This was a bit of a frustrating read for me. I picked this up only because it was a food-related book. However, there was no mention of anything even remotely related to baking until about 25% of the way into the book. Honestly, (spoiler alert and there will be more spoilers as we go) there was never even a cosy croissant cafe.
There is a lot going on in this book. It starts with Betty and Miles meeting up at Betty’s sister’s second home. They are both supposed to be staying there. Betty set it up with her sister and Miles set up his stay with Betty’s brother in law. Apparently they met before at the sister’s wedding and Miles snubbed Betty. Her feelings got all hurt and she’s holding a grudge about it. Do they talk about this rationally? Of course not!
You also find out that Betty went to that wedding with a date who got drunk and hit her and broke her wrist. She’s sworn off men since then. That’s a whole lot of backstory before the story even started.
But where do croissants come in? Well, Miles had a clothing company. For reasons that you don’t know about for a long time, he isn’t doing that now. He’s baking for fun. So they decide to do pop-up shops with some postcards and flowers and pastries and whatever else they find to sell. Of course stores with hardly anything in them are successful because this is a book.
Honestly, I really wanted to DNF this book. I didn’t care for these characters at all. At one point she was nattering on about how she didn’t use the bathroom in the house because Miles was attractive. I don’t deal with foolish characters well. Having a pony in the book made me give this book a bit of grace. It wasn’t enough though. I only kept reading because I got it from Netgalley and I’ve been DNFing way too many of the books from there.
