The Traveling Tea
Shop: A Novel. Belinda Jones. Penguin Group (USA). March
2015. 368 pp. ISBN#: 9780425279601.
Laurie
Davis gets a phenomenal opportunity – the chance to travel up the New England
coast with the famous TV cooking star, Pamela Lambert-Leigh, the star of Tea Time With Pamela. They are both British and totally enchanted
with CAKE! No, it’s not your average,
store-bought, boxed style cake but hand-crafted, beautifully decorated and
scrumptious-tasting cake, doughnuts, cupcakes or muffins! Yummy!
Laurie’s
job is to canvas the best of these bakeries or shops in New York, Connecticut,
Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. The planned new
cookbook will cover each creative space, baking process and a description of
what it’s like to taste each unique specialty cake in every location. Laurie
will be both assistant director arranging visits and tour guide in the
surrounding area of each location they visit. Sounds like a dream vacation,
doesn’t it? Not quite!
Pamela
has insisted that her feisty mother, Gracie, be their driver for the
project. Gracie is no doddering, elderly
lady but a feisty mother and grandmother.
She had a graced marriage, a fact that inspires Laurie who doesn’t
exactly have the greatest love history.
Gracie will be driving a double-decker British bus; only Laurie doesn’t
realize that Gracie drives every automobile like she’s competing at the
Indianapolis 500 final competition!
Add
to the mix that Pamela’s daughter, Ravenna, will be accompanying the
group. Ravenna is a very young woman
a/k/a obstinate super-brat, to summarize, so nasty that if it were not for
Laurie’s wise, sassy and funny responses, this reader would have quit reading;
but Laurie saves the day and engages the reader so cleverly that one wants to
keep flipping the pages to see if there’s a chance at redemption for this
terror of a daughter. In many other
ways, Ravenna also triggers Laurie’s thoughts about her own troubled
relationship with her own sister.
So
what mouth-watering, standard or exotic cake will make you determined to
travel? This novel absolutely makes one
want to go to each site to see the intriguing and beautiful area and test each delightful
dessert? Although this is a novel, the
places and desserts are obviously well-researched and actually exist in
reality! No, it’s not a romance but just
a lovely romp in which one gets to visualize and taste the best that New
England has to offer!
Highly
recommended reading, traveling and tasting!
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