Love à la Mode

The character of Henry was way too “how dare she like another guy” for me. Typical teen behavior I suppose, but definitely turned me off.

Rosie Radeke and Henry Yi are teens from the Midwest, two of the twenty teens who have been accepted into celebrity chef Denis Laurent's cooking school in Paris. Rosie and Henry meet and fall in love on the plane to Paris. Love always has obstacles, even love in Paris, and Rosie and Henry find it difficult to reveal their feelings, and the competition at the cooking school demands all their time.

A light YA romance for those who love cooking and Paris.

I'm a baker. I absolutely love baking, it centers me when I'm being scatter-brained and grounds me when I'm in a bad mood. So I instantly identified with Rosie in this novel, who wants to be a pastry chef, currently at a culinary school that focuses more on cooking savory things. I've been there. Granted, my culinary school was basically a crash course two-year program at a community college, not “the most prestigious cooking program for teens in the entire world” but I identify with the feeling of being a fish not-quite-out of water. I'd also never seen this put into words before:

“...it was that not knowing that Rosie hated. That was why she loved baking. Baking was all knowing. If you followed the recipe, you got exactly what you intended. An apple pie never surprisingly turned into lemon meringue halfway through the baking process.”

I have some mild anxiety, and I hadn't realized WHY baking helped, just that it did. But it's true - baking is about knowing. That quote is in the second chapter, and I knew from then on I was going to love this book. (I was already pretty sure, but that moment drove it home.)

The descriptions of food in this novel - food and cooking, and WHY some people cook - are mouth-watering. I loved seeing the backgrounds of the various culinary students, as they came from all over the world to École Denis Laurent, the prestigious school in Paris. I liked the point made, eventually, that what looks like the “cool kids clique” from outside might not be what it seems. The book even addressed toxic masculinity in the form of Henry's unwillingness to ask for help from his friends when he was struggling.

At its heart, Love à la Mode is a sweet, fluffy, clean romance with a romantic backdrop of Paris and good food. Sometimes a little bit of happy, lighthearted escapist fiction is what we all need. Especially when it doesn't neglect representation to do it - there's only a tiny bit of LGBT+ rep in the book, but the characters come from all kinds of ethnic backgrounds.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.