Review: Apricot Kisses

Book Review: Apricot Kisses, by Claudia Winter

✩✩


Hanna has a foodie’s dream job: as a culinary journalist, she gets to travel across Europe to write up the Continent’s finest restaurants. But after penning a scathing review of a restaurant nestled in a Tuscan apricot grove, her boss informs her of a big problem: when the restaurant’s owner read the article, she keeled over dead from a heart attack. Now the owner’s grandson, Fabrizio, has filed a lawsuit against the magazine, and if Hanna can’t convince him to drop the case, she’ll lose her job.
Determined to keep her career off the chopping block, Hanna returns to the restaurant to apologize. But upon her arrival, she finds that the little old lady’s death has created more than just the usual grief, since Granny’s will stipulates that Fabrizio will inherit the restaurant if—and only if—he’s married. With time running out for them both, the young man offers a crazy deal: he’ll drop the lawsuit if Hanna agrees to be his bride. As things heat up in and out of the kitchen, the two wonder: Could Granny’s scheme turn out to be a recipe for romance?

Genre: contemporary romance

Publishing date: December 2015

Mature content: no

Review: Apricot Kisses is a fun, clean, heartwarming romance, and while in some places it will make you laugh out loud, deep down in contains an important lesson on why everything in life happens for a reason. 


Hanna is an half German-half Italian food critic that’s been fooling herself for quite some time that she has everything in life she really needs. Fabrizio is an Italian man haunted by the responsibility of managing his family’s crumbling estate, their restaurant and hotel and apricot orchard. They meet by chance, over the ashes of Fabrizio’s dead grandmother (literally), but their destinies are more intertwined than you could ever guess. From then onwards, their lives will never be the same. 

Add to this one manipulating Italian grandmother (that dies right at the beginning of the book but whose legacy lives on right until the epilogue), one crazy Italian family and one ever crazier little Italian village, where the mailman is also the bank manager and the mayor, and where every single detain of one’s life is a public affair. 

I almost balked at reading this book when I saw that it was written in the first person. For some reason that I can’t really explain, this is a small detail that usually bothers me in books. I very much prefer to have the story told from an impersonal point of view.  But in the case of Apricot Kisses, the personal touch certainly works. The story is told from two alternating points of view (Hanna’s and Fabrizio’s), and through their eyes we see all the plot unfold. 



All in all, I enjoyed it immensely. It was my first book by Claudia Winter, but it certainly will not be my last as long as I can find her other books translated into English (because all the other editions that seem to be available at Amazon right now are in German...). 

It's a wonderful summer read and I recommend it!

Happy readings,

the book worm, book blog

Comments

  1. This sounds adorable! I totally want to read it! Thanks for sharing this at the Booknificent Thursday link-up on Mommynificent.com this week!
    Tina

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment