Review: Donut Fall in Love by Jackie Lau

Donuts. Yum! A hot actor and a bakery store owner. Swoon! Cooking lessons, a reality baking show, living with grief, and learning to embrace the changes in life, both good and bad. Ahhhh! Jackie Lau's sweet contemporary rom-com, Donut Fall in Love, has a taste of all of these.

Ryan Kwok is an actor who is taking a break after his latest movie, a romance, isn't performing as expected at the box office. He's moved home to Toronto and is grieving the recent loss of his mother, to whom he was incredibly close. He has a more strained relationship with his father, who has started trolling him on Twitter for all of the shirtless pictures Ryan has posted. Lindsay McLeod is a baker who makes absolutely delectable sounding donuts. Her best friend has just gotten married and left on her honeymoon, Lindsay's new roommate is not unfriendly exactly but definitely standoffish, and her mother brought a man she's just had a date with to Lindsay's bakery, a man who looks very much like Lindsay's late father. She's having a rather bad day when Ryan runs into her, literally, ruining two newly finished, full trays of her donut of the day, making her mood and her day even worse. Not the best first impression. Cut to Ryan's agent getting him a gig on a celebrity baking show, the one Ryan used to watch with his mom. In an effort to have a good showing, he hires Lindsay to teach him to bake. Things in the kitchen heat up a lot.

Both Ryan and Lindsay are nice characters and their relationship grows quickly from friendship to more. Neither of them have a lot of confidence in their ability to maintain a relationship though and that provides some of the tension here. Ryan is also worried about how his fame, and especially a decidedly mediocre movie, impacts other Asian American actors. Add to this his very fresh and real grief over the loss of his mother and he is carrying quite a heavy load. Lindsay appears to have her life together but, in fact, she's fairly lonely and having trouble with all of the life changes she has around her happening at once. Their insecurities in the relationship feel real and honest, especially for one where one partner is famous and famously attractive and the other is a regular person. Grief and the necessity of moving forward is well handled. The attraction between the Ryan and Lindsay is palpable and sex scenes are pretty steamy. And as for the donuts, well, prepare for your mouth to water a lot. The book is sweet and cute and a perfect read heading into Valentine's Day.