The premise of Violet Duke’s Love, Chocolate, and Beer is interesting and original: a brewmaster/pub owner and a master chocolatier and chocolate shop owner make a bet about whose product is ultimately more romantic: beer or chocolate. Their creative attempts to outdo one another are fun, and their relationship is fairly believable. I also enjoyed the detailed descriptions of brewing beer and making chocolates, up to a point. If the book had ended shortly after the contest did, I’d give it 4 hearts. But it didn’t: it dragged on with little to nothing happening, and then multiple BIG SECRETS came out and had to be dealt with and analyzed ad nauseum, and then finally it was “and they lived happily ever after.”
Aside from the unnecessary last third or so of the book, everything was just too descriptive and exaggerated. Here’s an entirely representative sample:
“Eyes dancing with delight, Dani look at the three of them like they were the nuttiest comedy act she’d ever met, for which, she was all ready to buy tickets to the next show.”
Um, yeah, whatever. Much of the book is like that, with over-the-top descriptions and characters and actions and conversations. This book was reasonably enjoyable, but I’m not going to look for the rest of the series.