Laura Florand continues her Amour et Chocolate – pairing men and women who fall in love but don’t know how to communicate the love and acceptance they feel for one another in a way the other understands.
Neither The Chocolate Rose nor The Chocolate Touch engage in the magical realism of The Chocolate Kiss, but as in the previous book, our heroes try to communicate their feelings through food. That is what hooks me with these books – the character’s need to feed the ones they love. I communicate better through food than through language, but it is a terrible way to communicate.
The Chocolate Rose: Jolie Manon, is the daughter of a former three Michelin star chef and trying to break into food writing. Gabriel Delange once worked for her father, but now has his own restaurant in the South of France, and feels the chef inappropriately took credit for Gabriel’s work. A lawsuit brings our protagonists together, but it is Jolie’s fear of being over-shadowed by another large ego that keeps them apart.
Jolie and Gabriel are moderately compelling as characters, they like to play power exchange games in the bedroom, which makes them slightly more memorable.
3 Stars
If you read only one of the Amour et Chocolat series, I strongly recommend it be The Chocolate Touch. Dominique Richard and Jamie Corey are passionate and wounded characters. the Chocolate Touch stands on it’s own as a novel and need not be read as part of the series. In fact, I would suggest buying The Chocolate Touch and borrowing the others.
Jamie is struggling to not let an act of brutality define who she will be in the future, and Dom worries that his brutal past will harm the people around him. They struggle to be as generous with themselves as they are with each other.
4 Stars