Jennifer Sylvester is kind of a joke in Green Valley, Tennessee, where she’s know as the Banana Cake Queen because—well, you can guess why. The recipe is a family secret. People don’t take her seriously. One of the locals called her “stranger than a vegetarian at a barbecue.” And on top of that, her parents are bullies, especially her mom. She’s forbidden to wear anything but her Sunday best clothes out in public. Now, she’s definitely old enough to be living on her own, but with the way her family treats her (borderline abuse), it’s really difficult for her to move out. They have her working full-time in the family bakery, but they don’t give her a salary. What she wants more than anything is to start a family, but with her so isolated, she never really meets men in any useful way.
Cletus Winston is one of the many Winston brothers we’ve met in previous books. He’s the weird one. But he’s also clever and entertaining. Jennifer knows he’s regarded as “the most powerful man in East Tennessee” (because “he could make anything happen”). He’s kind of arrogant, but somehow it’s not as irritating as it is on other people. He also doesn’t think much of her:
The show of confidence had been completely out of character for meek and docile Jennifer Sylvester.
Granted, I didn’t know her very well. I didn’t need to. She was a weak person.
But then she surprises Cletus by catching him on video doing something he shouldn’t, and then using that to get him to help her. Basically extorting him to get his help in finding a husband so she can start that family she so desperately wants.
Cletus decides that to accomplish what she wants, she needs lessons and practice. So he challenges her to do different things (paint her fingernails a bold color, dye her hair a color other than what her mom wants, …). Doing these things is difficult for Jennifer and overcoming this is her character arc. She feels undervalued by her family (because she is) and she needs to find some self-confidence somewhere and build it up. And get on with her adult life. Cletus helps her do that, but she’s the one who does the real work. Cletus doesn’t have as strong an arc, because his main thing is that he learns to see her as more than a meek and docile girl.
Like always with Reid’s books, this one’s funny and fairly steamy at times, though it’s a slow build. It’s equally surprising to Jennifer and Cletus when they end up together. Her dialogue is good even though it’s all about a couple of odd people who speak a little… oddly at times. As with all the books in this series, the setting’s fun and unusual (you don’t see rural eastern Tennessee come up often, do you?). We also see the setup for book #4, which was released fairly recently. Check Beard Science out if you like quirky characters.