3.5 stars ( )

Third time's the charm people! I'm not gonna lie, I didn't have much hope for the series after reading the first two installments of the Donner Bakery but this one was a keeper! Everything just flowed nicely, the characters were decent and the chemistry between the leads was smoking hot! Sure there was the whole instant love bit going on but it was easy to overlook and was good enough to eat!

( )

Sweet story.
This is part of the Smartypants romance series which is connected to the Winston brothers series by Penny Reid.
Hero is moody and quiet.
I felt it could have done with the odd chapter or an epilogue from the Hero's POV.
Connections to the Winston brothers and history of Green Valley explored.
No intimate scenes other than the Hero and heroine.
No other woman or man drama.
I did feel when things went wrong he left the heroine deeply crushed while he sorted his head out, esp over Xmas instead of sorting things out with her so she knew where she stood sooner.
She was pretty crushed, thinking he hated her.
HEA.
Epilogue. ( )

Sophie Copeland is on a cross-country trip which will end in Boston at her best friend's new bakery. When her car breaks down in Green Valley, she decides to stay for a few months working at Donner Bakery. She gets a temporary rental from Joel Barnes; he runs an auto repair shop though she's already had her car taken to Cletus Winston's shop. While Green Valley is generally a friendly place, there is some dark secret about Joel that makes people stay away from him.
I really liked the first two books in the series and we get to see a lot of Tempest and Joy here in the third book, though I miss Joss. This book was just okay. It's told completely in Sophie's POV which I think was a mistake because Joel was just a cipher for most of the book. I would have liked to get his view on Sophie and what was happening in Green Valley. Their relationship wasn't all that much, mostly lust and sex between two lonely people with long periods of no contact (we're talking two months, so when they don't talk for two weeks, it doesn't make for much of a chance for any relationship to develop).
Sophie wasn't all that interesting either. She's confident enough to travel across country by herself but obsesses over her failed reality tv show appearance. I couldn't get a fix on her personality and finally just gave up. The Paul Newman fixation was odd, I guess meant to show her as quirky, but she was mostly tired and didn't want to talk to anyone.
I usually like having the Winstons and their friends show up, but except for Joy, the rest didn't seem like themselves in the other books. And if you've read the other books, the plot was pretty predictable. It's not a bad story, but it just wasn't for me. ( )