Synopsis
Rory Perez, a food truck owner who can’t cook, is struggling to keep the business she inherited from her aunt out of the red–and an upcoming contest during Modest’s annual food truck festival seems the best way to do it. The prize money could finally give her a solid financial footing and keep her cousin with special needs paid up at her beloved assisted living home. Then maybe Rory will have enough time to meet the man she’s been talking to via an anonymous online dating site.
Jude Strong is tired of being a puppet at his manipulative father’s law firm, and the food truck festival seems like the perfect opportunity to dive into his passion for cooking and finally call his life his own. But if he loses the contest, he’s back at the law firm for good. Failure is not an option.
Complications arise when Rory’s chef gets mono and she realizes she has to cook after all. Then Jude discovers that his stiffest competition is the same woman he’s been falling for online the past month.
Will these unlikely chefs sacrifice it all for the sake of love? Or will there only ever be tacos for one?
My Thoughts
This was such a fun story and a nice break from the darker stories that I have been consuming in October.
The story follows Rory and Jude who are communicating on an anonymous dating app and happen to also know each other in real life. Rory owns a food truck but is not the best cook and Jude is a few steps from becoming a lawyer but really would love to be a cook. (It’s fairly easy to see where the story will go). The predictability of romance stories is one of the main reasons that I don’t often reach for them. I tend to enjoy the twists in a book the most, so when I can see the ending coming from the first chapter, I don’t have as much fun. (Unpopular opinion, but I also don’t enjoy Hallmark movies for the same reason…)
For a contemporary romance story, given that it’s not my preferred genre, I really enjoyed it. I loved all of the food references and found myself hungry for Tacos several times while reading it.
I also found that Rory and Jude were enjoyable to follow…the fact that Rory owned a food truck but couldn’t cook often made me smile. There are many moments where the reader gets to see the messages between Rory and Jude on their anonymous dating site and the banter is a lot of fun to read, I also liked seeing their relationship evolve. It was nice to see them fall in love with each other based on personality only. The story was very clean but had very little faith content.
There were also lots of references to “You’ve Got Mail” but again, I’ve never seen the movie so they flew right over my head. I was obviously not the intended audience for this one.
Overall, this was a cute, clean “pallet cleanser” story for me that I enjoyed for what it was. Fans of romance would most likely love it. Recommended!
I received a copy of this book from the author/publisher to read and review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
My Rating
amandainpa 