{"id":324,"date":"2015-03-17T11:23:27","date_gmt":"2015-03-17T15:23:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lklawless.com\/chickliterate\/?p=324"},"modified":"2015-04-05T16:37:48","modified_gmt":"2015-04-05T20:37:48","slug":"love-chocolate-and-beer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lklawless.com\/chickliterate\/love-chocolate-and-beer","title":{"rendered":"Love, Chocolate, and Beer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lklawless.com\/chickliterate\/tag\/3-hearts-award\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.lklawless.com\/images\/3hearts.gif\" alt=\"Love, Chocolate, and Beer - Violet Duke - 3 hearts award\" align=\"right\"><\/a>The premise of Violet Duke&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/B00I4KRGPA\/lawless03-20\">Love, Chocolate, and Beer<\/a> 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&#8217;d give it 4 hearts. But it didn&#8217;t:<!--more--> 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 &#8220;and they lived happily ever after.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Aside from the unnecessary last third or so of the book, everything was just too descriptive and exaggerated. Here&#8217;s an entirely representative sample:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Eyes dancing with delight, Dani look at the three of them like they were the nuttiest comedy act she&#8217;d ever met, for which, she was all ready to buy tickets to the next show.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;m not going to look for the rest of the series.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The premise of Violet Duke&#8217;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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_analytify_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[38,27],"class_list":["post-324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chick-lit-books","tag-3-hearts-award","tag-american-chick-lit"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pgrK2-5e","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lklawless.com\/chickliterate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lklawless.com\/chickliterate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lklawless.com\/chickliterate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lklawless.com\/chickliterate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lklawless.com\/chickliterate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=324"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.lklawless.com\/chickliterate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":327,"href":"https:\/\/www.lklawless.com\/chickliterate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324\/revisions\/327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lklawless.com\/chickliterate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lklawless.com\/chickliterate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lklawless.com\/chickliterate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}