Kissing Kosher is a soup of a book. It’s a tasty broth with lots of yummy ingredients but a bit more simmering might have resulted in a more robust product.

Avital Cohen needs help. A lot of help. Her family bakery Best Babka in Brooklyn is understaffed, her dreams of being a world-class photographer are slowly dying with each rejection letter and her love life is sadly DoA. The cherry on top is that she suffers from debilitating chronic pelvic pain caused by her interstitial cystitis. Enter Ethan Rosenberg-Lippmann. With his culinary credentials, he’s way overqualified for the position at the bakery, and his charm – coupled with his outstanding good looks – makes him even more overqualified for the position of a future lover. The fact that he’s even interviewing at Best Babka is surprising – but he is easily the best of all the candidates Avital has spoken to. She hires him against her better judgment because really, a man that talented shouldn’t want to work on the bottom rung of a small kosher bakery.

He doesn’t. Long ago, the Lippmann and Cohen families were partners that started a confectionery business together but the Cohen patriarch drove the Lippmanns out, an act that started a decades-long feud. Ethan has faked a resumé, complete with a litany of culinary schools and fancy restaurants he never attended or worked at, all so he can get into Best Babka and steal their famous pumpkin spice babka recipe.

Not so surprisingly, given this is a romance, Ethan quickly discovers that he loves the charm of working at the small eatery. He’s also pretty wild about his boss, who is beautiful, kind, and smart. There are all sorts of hurdles to any possible romance, though. For one, Ethan is lying to Avital. For another, she blows hot and cold – interested one minute and then shoving him away the next.

Avital doesn’t mean to blow hot and cold but she’s in a difficult position. Her interstitial cystitis is flaring so badly that she’s in constant pain, and her disease means there is almost no chance of having sex – even the mildest tingling of desire can set her vaginal area into agonizing cramps. With feuding families, major dishonesty, chronic illness, and a failure to communicate keeping them apart, can Avital and Ethan actually reach an HEA?

Of course they can, because this is a magic-wand romance where the author enchantingly resolves major issues with minor fixes. In other words, this novel is a strange amalgamation of serious problems – Avital’s disease and how she can’t get help from traditional medicine, Ethan’s abusive grandfather and how Ethan has been forced to circumnavigate ethical behavior because of him, major lies between the hero and heroine, a girl with brain damage being held hostage for Ethan’s compliance – and plentiful humor. Avital’s disorder requires constant aeration of her nether regions and Ethan hilariously sees a full moon when they trip over each other. Ethan becomes besties with a knitting-obsessed ex-con who makes them caps saying “little buddy” and “big buddy”. There’s a pot-smoking rabbi and a brother who is endlessly high but offers excellent life advice. Almost all the secondary characters are eccentric sweethearts – quirky but with lots of charm.

The same can be said of the leads. Avital is a warm, wonderful person from a loving family who treats her employees with oodles of kindness. She is capable of running a successful business while ill, but of course does so in an unconventional manner. Best Babka is all about giving people second chances, and many of the employees have unique backstories. This might also explain why, once she learns that Ethan had been bullied into lying to her, she is all forgiveness and anxious to help him.

Ethan is more confusing. His grandfather was/is hateful, constantly berating him and threatening to hurt Ethan’s brother and sister if Ethan doesn’t jump to his every command. However, Ethan himself is all sunshine – a kind, gentle, caring person, and I simply couldn’t understand how that happened. I would have expected him to need more grit just to survive or to be like his brother and disappear in a fog of cannabis and rebellion. Instead, he is a perfect beta hero, happy to enslave himself to Avital’s every need and want. Avital describes him as her “her rock, her guide, her knight in shining armor”. He’s too wonderful to be real but in many ways that suits the plot. The story is as close to a fantasy as you can get without actually using magic.

A strong positive is that the author clearly knows this. Inconsistency is talked about not just in terms of faith (which in this novel is very inconsistent) but in terms of humanity. People don’t always make sense nor does life, and that’s all part of the adventure. I think the fact that this is a woman’s fiction/romance hybrid also contributes to the story’s disparity; the women’s fiction portion focuses on discussing serious issues but the romance has it delivering a light-hearted love story.

Regarding the faith in the novel: the author is Jewish both culturally and religiously. I, therefore didn’t mark down for the inconsistencies or anything I might have found odd regarding this subject (such as the pot-growing rabbi) in the text. Metzger is a lot more qualified to know what is and isn’t representative of her people and culture than this reviewer.

Whether you enjoy Kissing Kosher or not will depend on how well you are able to suspend disbelief and how good you are at juxtaposing zany humor with information dumps on chronic illness and non-traditional approaches to pain management. There’s a bit less sex but I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys authors like Susan Elizabeth Phillps, Rachel Gibson, Alexis Daria, and Tessa Bailey and who doesn’t mind the lower heat level.