Paris Daillencourt is About to Crumble is the second book in Alexis Hall’s Winner Bakes All series, which pays homage to and pokes affectionate fun at The Great British Bake-Off as some of the contestants on its fictional counterpart, Bake Expectations, fall in love throughout the weeks of the competition. The first thing anyone contemplating reading it should know is that despite the bright, cartoon cover, this book is NOT a romantic comedy.  Rather, it’s the story of a young man living with chronic, undiagnosed, and untreated anxiety who slowly falls apart and then starts to put the pieces back together, with a romantic subplot and a very tentative HFN.

There’s a lot to unpack here, so I’m going to do something I don’t normally do, and quote from the book blurb to set the scene:

Paris Daillencourt is a recipe for disaster. Despite his passion for baking, his cat, and his classics degree, constant self-doubt and second-guessing have left him a curdled, directionless mess. So when his roommate enters him in Bake Expectations, the nation’s favourite baking show, Paris is sure he’ll be the first one sent home.

But not only does he win week one’s challenge—he meets fellow contestant Tariq Hassan. Sure, he’s the competition, but he’s also cute and kind, with more confidence than Paris could ever hope to have. Still, neither his growing romance with Tariq nor his own impressive bakes can keep Paris’s fear of failure from spoiling his happiness.

Paris is, for the most part, a sympathetic character, and it’s easy to see that he really wants to be a good person but that his fears and anxiety make him somewhat self-centred and cause him to hurt the people he cares about. His belief that he’s unloveable and ‘too much’ isn’t surprising, considering his parents seem to have dumped him at school when he was thirteen and just left him to get on with it, and he doesn’t seem to have any real grasp of why he feels and acts as he does, which results in his constantly making poor decisions and sabotaging himself. Now twenty-one, he’s studying for a degree in Classics at UCL (University College London) and doesn’t have any close family or friends he can turn to or who are in a position to really notice just how much he’s struggling with, well, everything.

Tariq Hassan is a sparkly, fabulous, unapologetically gay Muslim who knows who he is and what he wants. He’s sweet and kind and funny, with the kind of flair and self-confidence Paris utterly lacks; he’s also devout and doesn’t believe in sex before marriage, which pretty much wrecks his and Paris’ first date when Paris bluntly says he doesn’t know why a guy would want to be with him (Paris, that is) if sex isn’t on the table. Naturally, Tariq doesn’t think much of that and the evening ends on a sour note, but Paris manages to apologise (eventually) and gets Tariq to give him a second chance.

Thankfully, Paris does eventually get the help he needs (although I’m not convinced he would have done so but for circumstances which make it pretty much impossible for him NOT to) and I began to enjoy him as a character. With all the fear and self-doubt receding, we get to see the real Paris underneath it all, a slightly awkward yet charming young man with a good sense of humour and a genuine desire to get better and do the work he needs to do on himself to get there. Unfortunately, however, that doesn’t happen until over three-quarters of the way through the book, and there came a point around the halfway point where I started to wish the author had included Tariq’s PoV simply to break up the full-on, full-throttle Paris-in-panic-mode spiralling. I really wish we’d been able to spend a bit more time with the healthier version of him.

Paris Daillencourt is About to Crumble is a difficult book to review because it is, at times, a difficult book to read. Not only is being in Paris’ head all the time kind of exhausting – following his thought processes is like being on a train hurtling towards catastrophe in a disaster movie – but reading all the tangential inner monologues, superfluous dialogue and unfinished sentences is literally difficult and hard to follow. Coming at the book primarily as a romance reader and reviewing it for a romance book site, I have to say that the love story plays second-fiddle to Paris, his issues and his eventual personal growth. I did enjoy Paris and Tariq as a couple in the beginning and near the end; Tariq is good for Paris and helps him to see the ways in which his behaviour is not only self-destructive but hurtful to those around him, and I liked that he has some of his own moments of self-revelation towards the end, too.

Maybe it’s on me, but I was surprised when I realised Paris and Tariq were both so young. I don’t know why, but I’d expected them to be older than twenty-one and twenty, and I suspect their ages – together with everything they’re going through – internet trolls, TV fame, Paris’ mental health crisis – are part of the reason I didn’t quite buy that they would make it long-term.  (It’s difficult to believe that the no-premarital-sex thing isn’t going to be a problem down the line as well.)  The book ends on a tentative HFN, which feels right considering where Paris and Tariq are at that point, but when I finish a romance novel, I want to feel the characters are going to be together for the foreseeable future, not that they’ll have split up within a year or so.

I’m a big fan of Alexis Hall’s writing, which is always clever, sharply observed and sparklingly witty. The very Britishness of his humour absolutely resonates with me, and, as was the case with the previous book (Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake) the parts of the story that are set during the competition are a lot of fun. He writes about anxiety and depression in a sensitive and relatable way, and I appreciated the exploration of what it means to be privileged yet unhappy or devout and queer, of how it must feel to receive a diagnosis and then start on the long and often uphill road to recovery.

In the end, I enjoyed Paris Daillencourt is About to Crumble and would certainly recommend it provided you’re prepared to adjust your expectations as regards the romance. I’ve read reviews from people who also live with anxiety issues who have said they found the mental health rep very good and Paris’ experiences very relatable, but also that they found reading triggering in some instances, so please take that into account if you’re thinking about picking this one up.

Buy it at: Amazon, Audible or your local bookshop

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