Baking Me Crazy
I wanted to read Karla Sorensen’s Baking Me Crazy because I’m always looking for good representation, and the heroine of this book uses a wheelchair due to transverse myelitis. The story, a friends-to-lovers romance, takes a realistic look at disabled life, but I’d have preferred the conflict not to be so centered on the heroine’s disability.
The men in Levi Buchanan’s family are reputed to fall in love just once, and forever. Levi was sunk the first time he saw Jocelyn – Joss – Abernathy shoot threes at wheelchair basketball. However Joss, only recently moved to town and out of the hospital, didn’t feel ready to date. She told Levi she needed a friend, and for the last five years, he’s been that, and only that. But when Joss develops a crush on someone else, Levi decides to try again.
Levi calls Joss “Sonic”, because she’s prickly like a hedgehog – which pretty much summarizes her personality – and rolls around super fast. She bakes, although it seems more like something she does to make sure the book can be hooked into Penny Reid’s Winston Brothers universe (she works at Jennifer Donner’s bakery). The author has clearly done her research on transverse myelitis, and I was happy to see the information and realism about how Joss lives with her disability. One thing I really appreciated is the normalization of a character who both uses a wheelchair and is capable of short distance walking and standing. However, I did worry that there was too much emphasis on it. It seemed like almost everything about Joss came back to her wheelchair – her mother overprotecting her, her cute customer turning out to be her new physical therapist, her reasons for rejecting Levi. She tells Levi he can’t possibly love her, because he can’t want to take on, as she puts it, “this:”
And you’re going to turn me at night? Make sure I have blankets between my knees so I don’t get sores? Deal with the fact that I haven’t gotten a solid night’s sleep in seven years? You’re going to stand by when people look at me the way they do? Be rude when they meet me? Assume I’m helpless?… You know parts of it. And you know the parts that you’ve seen. But you’re not ready for this. This isn’t what you want.
Of course it’s reasonable for her to think about her disability and her future with Levi. But… a relationship needs to be between people and personalities as well.
As for Levi, he’s gorgeous, wonderful, supportive, and completely in love with Joss. I’m not big on ‘fated mates’ in non-paranormals, so that felt silly. But there is nuance here. Joss is concerned that Levi’s friendship was just a way of hanging around in the hopes of eventually sleeping with her, while Levi has to ask himself if he has been diminishing Joss’s ability to make decisions (although he stumbles at this at the end as well).
While I think the book could have been stronger, I did enjoy it. It’s a quick, lighthearted read, and worth picking up.
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I'm a history geek and educator, and I've lived in five different countries in North America, Asia, and Europe. In addition to the usual subgenres, I'm partial to YA, Sci-fi/Fantasy, and graphic novels. I love to cook.
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Book Details
| Reviewer: | Caroline Russomanno |
|---|---|
| Review Date: | June 4, 2022 |
| Publication Date: | 10/2019 |
| Grade: | B |
| Sensuality | Warm |
| Book Type: | Contemporary Romance |
| Review Tags: | bakery | disability | friends to lovers | Love at First Sight series | wheelchair |
When I hear about wheelchair basketball I think of one of my favorite documentaries, “Murderball”. The film focuses on the rivalry between the Canadian and U.S. teams leading up to the 2004 Paralympic Games and the lives of the young men before and after they wound up in wheelchairs. What I liked best was that it showed them as just that, young men, with all that implies about sports, sex, competitiveness, and getting on with life. It was up for the 2006 Oscar for best documentary but lost out to “March of the Penguins”. Much as I loved the birds, I thought the documentary about the humans should have won.
Karla Sorensen was one of my favorite “discoveries” last year and I eagerly gulped down much of her back list. One of the things she does beautifully is present female characters who love being physically engaged (through sports and exercise) and for whom the gym and playing fields are second nature—such as how Joss doesn’t let her condition stop her from being involved in basketball or from working out. I do think the books Sorensen wrote to fit into the Penny Reid universe were a little weaker than the worlds she (Sorensen) has created in her Washington Wolves and Ward Sisters books (which I highly recommend, especially FAKED and FORBIDDEN). I think of Karla Sorensen much in the way I think of Julie Kriss: an underrated writer who consistently produces entertaining, well-written books, but always somehow staying under the radar.
I will definitely try her again. Thanks for the recs on her other worlds – there is an overlap here, as Levi’s brother works (for? with? can’t remember) the Wolves organization and Levi has a job interview with them.
Yes! Her books & characters are inter-related, but it’s lightly done and most of her books do just fine as stand-alones. One of the interesting things Sorensen does is have her characters age, so that the MCs of the earlier Washington Wolves books (THE BOMBSHELL EFFECT and THE MARRIAGE EFFECT) are the parents or older siblings of the characters in the later Wolves and Ward Sisters books. So if your HEAs have to be frozen in time, you might not want to read the earlier books because, while they’re still happily in love, in the later books those MCs now have gray hair and laugh lines and the heroes have long since aged out of playing professional football.