Jenny Colgan - Little Beach Street Bakery

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.

Comment: This is the first book in a series set in Cornwall, featuring the inhabitants of a small town and how it all begins when Polly brings her bread making skills to a place that desperately needed good bread.

When Polly and her ex see their business fail, it is also the end of their personal relationship. The bank took pretty much everything and now Polly doesn't have enough to pay rent in Plymouth and in a sort of desperate act, she investigates other places, such as the isolated place she discovers close enough to the city, in case she needs to commute for a job. But that small place is in dire need of a proper bakery and the current owner - also Polly's new landlady - is not someone open to change. 

Still, Polly loves to make bread and she can't be blamed for the wonderful smell coming out of her kitchen.. with time, Polly starts to set in, people start to want to buy her bread but life isn't that easy, and some problems happen as well. Still, could this be the answer for Polly's uncertain future?

Having already read other books by the author, I knew her style and what to expect: a cozy but more dramatically toned story than what the cute cover implies. I think the author's style is pure entertainment, and while the characters don't have it easy all the time, or not as often as one would expect from sweet contemporary romances, I still feel very good reading about these characters and when they go though bad or less good situations I feel those things to be cathartic and not impossible to bear.

Polly is the embodiment of so many people out there, people who bet all they had on something and then it didn't work out, and not only for lack of cleverness in business, but often due to many factors. The beginning of the novel was a little depressing, and especially when hearing on the news the difficulties of so many people who had "bad luck" certainly makes you think. Nevertheless, the blurb mentions "toxic relationship" and I thought her ex would be more alike a certain type of personality but Polly faced emotional and verbal abuse, not the physical I imagined. Of course, whatever it was, it shouldn't have happened, and I felt glad we didn't spend a lot of time in this section.

When Polly moves to a more isolated place, it feels a bit fairy tale like because despite the negative descriptions of certain things (like the state of the house), I couldn't help but picture something that could be quickly improved and when Polly starts to make bread, of course that is the key factor. Her situation isn't immediately perfect and amazing but the author wrote this in a rather well paced rhythm and I could feel how she slowly started to feel part of the community and became friends with some of the inhabitants.

This also helped me to have an idea of how Polly herself was progressing, improving and in this regards, the story is a little predictable, the evolution of things has some minor issues and then, when it feels as if the story is going onward to a more average type of development, one or two things happen and that changes some of what felt more obvious. It turned out the author had other plans and the story never lost its more dramatic tone, without it being too much.

There's some romance and while I liked certain parts of it, others were a bit annoying. I say this because the situation is obviously a difficult one and in real life people rarely have the will or the means or even the odds of making something like described here, work out. Still, I felt that while realistic, the whole situation between Polly and her love interest was a bit exaggerated to add more drama and closer to the end of the story I confess I expected some details to have been already steadier or defined.

The several bread and baking experiences Polly does are certainly suggestive and it shows the author investigated the several types of bread one might do. Some things did make me want to try as well, so i suppose the bread content did its job correctly. I also liked how such an apparent simple thing could so easily unite people, make them interested in being closer, in wanting to defend something... food does being people closer and while some scenes were a bit cliched, I think it still worked for the setting.

All in all, this was cute, entertaining, deeper than one could imagine and has a good enough HEA. I will read the rest of the series without a doubt.

Grade: 8/10