Review of The Boyfriend Recipe by Alex Miska

 by Alex Miska

2 stars

What would you do if you humiliated yourself in front of a Naked Kitchen Adonis… and then he appeared in your bakery months later?

DAVID
I watched in horror as my sister shattered yet another poor guy’s heart… only this time, I can’t get sweet, sexy, straight Hunter out of my head. My daily latte runs to Moore Delicious, the bakery where he works, aren’t helping. And now I’m in a bind: my favorite cousin insists that I attend her wedding. With a date. So she whips up a half-baked scheme that will piss off the family that disowned me and secure an ally by my side: ask my sister’s ex to pretend to be my boyfriend. The question is, will Hunter agree to play along?

HUNTER
Six months ago, I walked into my apartment to find a gorgeous man standing in my kitchen, wearing only a towel and a smile. And what did I do? Instead of saying hello and joining him in nudity, I stormed into the bedroom and accused my girlfriend of sleeping with her brother. To be fair, I didn’t know he was her brother at the time, and she really was cheating on me (just not with him). So I hide in the back every time the Naked Kitchen Adonis visits Moore Delicious… until the day he asks for more than his usual coffee, cookie, and suggestively-shaped banana. His proposal is intriguing. I like it. And him. A weekend spent serving up a little revenge while cozying up to the N.K.A. is more than tempting. The lengths we’ll have to go to make it believable definitely won’t be a hardship… but if things heat up, David will be the first man I’ve ever slept with.

We love short stories, love little snippets of how people fall in love, and The Boyfriend Recipe is one our favorite ideas, the fake-relationship.  Although this book has all the right ingredients (see what we did there – Boyfriend ‘RECIPE’) it didn’t work for us. 

Hunter is a Bi man, very recently broken up with his girlfriend Tonya after finding a naked man in their apartment.  The man is actually her brother David.  On chance David happens into the bakery where  

The number one reason that we aren’t super-fans is that we got a bit confused with the POV.  Yes, the chapters are labeled of who is speaking, but maybe there isn’t enough distinctions between their voices.  We actually had to flip back a few times to remind ourselves who was speaking. 

We aren’t big fans of romance with a side of angst, and Boyfriend Recipe doesn’t have a lot, but it never really fulfils its big issues.  David’s parents think he can choose to be gay, and there is great workup from David, but at the wedding there really isn’t much of a confrontation, it fizzles. 

And finally the sex.  Yes in 103 pages there is some heat between David and Hunter, but once Hunter reveals he is a man/man virgin and refers to it as his ‘precious flower’, we almost DNF.  But, then even after his weird outburst, that the wedding party and other refer to the next day, he goes ahead and jumps between the sheets with David, someone he is playing at a fake-relationship.  Ugh, it just didn’t work.

So, all in all, this was not our cup of tea, and thankfully at 103 pages it was a quick read.