Life, Love and Lemon Cookies

Title: Life, Love and Lemon Cookies
Author: Ally Blue
Cover Artist: Valerie Tibbs
Publisher: Samhain Publishing
Amazon:
Genre: Contemporary M/M
Length: Short Story/50 PDF pages
Rating: 4.25 stars out of 5

Review Summary: Lots of angst but enough love for a very happy ever after for Chris and Matt.

THE BLURB

When life hands you lemons…make cookies.

A Love’s Evolution story.

Chris Tucker’s perfect life has just gone up in smoke. The fire that destroyed the best restaurant in Asheville took his head-chef dream job along with it—and the owner is walking away. Sure, Chris still has his beautiful home and blissful marriage to his soul mate, Matt Gallagher. But for the first time in his working life, he’s unemployed and spiraling into depression.

Matt’s trying hard to be supportive, but it’s tough when every time he tries to get Chris to open up, the man shuts down tighter than a live clam. Maybe it’s best to hide his hurt and back off. Yet as Chris’s fruitless search for work wears on, Matt begins to wonder if his lover will ever come around.

As the tension between them reaches breaking point, Chris faces the fact that it could be the end of an era for him and Matt. Unless one sweet idea can turn his mounting troubles into a fresh-cut path back to the arms of the one man who makes him whole.

THE REVIEW

I think I’ve mentioned before that I don’t deal well with a lot of angst but I really wanted to read this story because I had read Love’s Evolution 5 years ago where Chris and Matt met, fell in love and got married and I wanted to find out what had happened to that love in the intervening years. Also, although Ally Blue’s stories have lots of angst, she knows when to rein it in.

The Falls, the high end restaurant where Chris had been Head Chef for 15 years, went up in smoke and not only did he almost die in the fire but one week later he joined the ranks of the unemployed when the owner decided not to rebuild. Not exactly a good week. Of course he was grateful his injuries weren’t any more serious than smoke inhalation, but the thought of being out of work was scary, especially in the current economy. Unfortunately the only person he could talk to was also the one person he could not talk to because he was so stressed out. To say that Chris was devastated would be an understatement – cooking wasn’t only his job, being a Chef was part of who he was.

Two and a half months later Chris was still unemployed. He had applied to 23 restaurants, but despite his impressive resume (or maybe because of it since potential employers probably thought he was overqualified) he was facing the prospect that he might never work in his field again. So far there were no job offers and he was depressed enough that he was thinking of applying at a chain like Applebee’s because it was better than having no income, but Matt wouldn’t hear of it and kept encouraging him not to give up. However Chris could see no light at the end of this particular tunnel.

Being without a job for months was terrible but there was added stress on the relationship because Chris refused to confide his fears, and how depressed he was in the one person who loved him above anyone else. He couldn’t talk to Matt about his sense of failure, the hopelessness, feelings of inadequacy and the loss of self since his job was integral to being Chris the person. He was too proud to share his fears as they might make him seem less of a man.

I thought that the characters were realistically drawn as I would imagine that suddenly being unemployed after holding down a prestigious job for 15 years would be a blow to the ego as well as the wallet, and Ally Blue did a great job of showing how diminished Chris felt at being financially supported by Matt. There was a heavy toll on their marriage and the hurt and anger kept getting in the way, but the sex which was still wonderful after all these years, helped keep the marriage from falling apart.

This character-driven short story dealt with some tough issues in 50 pages and it was probably a good strategy not to write another novel around this plot because the level of angst might be too high over 200 pages (for me anyway) :). I liked the way that the story focused on Chris and the emotional turmoil he couldn’t articulate to his husband although he knew how much Matt loved him. Matt tried to support Chris but he was also stressed because Chris shut him out.

This is a well written and revealing story that fans of Ally Blue and readers who like a lot of angst will love. Life, Love and Lemon Cookies can be read as a standalone as there is enough of Matt’s and Chris’s backstory provided, however Love’s Evolution is a very good book and I would urge you to get it if you haven’t read this story. I believe it’s still available from Samhain. For me it was wonderful to meet Matt and Chris so many years later regardless of the less than ideal circumstances.

The ending of LL & LC was well done but I would have loved a little more showing and a bridge before the epilogue 15 months later.

Definitely recommended.

Life, Love and Lemon Cookies is available from Samhain on Tuesday, August 16.