An Acquired Taste by Kelly Cain


 2/5 Stars

Rowan has worked for years in her mother restaurant and is hoping to expand the restaurant so she enters a completion in order to be able to expand. The problem? Her arch nemesis from culinary school Knox. Knox is restaurant royalty and, even Rowan hates to admit it, an amazing chef. Soon their rivalry sparks heat in and outside the kitchen.

Before I start ranting about what I hate hate about this book (because it might go on for a while) lets talk about what I did like. I loved the recipes at the start of each chapter, it bought an amazing feel to the book and helped immerse myself into the book for at least a little bit. I also loved the talk of family and talk of how important it is and seeing how much love Rowan had for her family was lovely to see.

Now onto what I didn't like. I hated the romance I didn't understand at all why Knox was interested in Rowan as all she did was act like he was evil for no reason, at least at the start but I'll get to that soon, I didn't understand why Rowan liked Knox as he was boring and lacked personality. I felt like all the side characters outside of Rowans immediate family (her brother and Mother) lacked any depth or characteristic besides the need to fulfil the main characters plot. For example Mike who was nice but boring as he was only there for Rowan to use to get over Knox. 

The main reason i was interested in this book was because it was enemies to lovers and while they were defiantly enemies it felt more like one guy who liked a girl and one girl who hated a guy for literally no reason and spend 200 pages talking about how mean and arrogant he is without giving any examples. And when we finally did get examples the only ones we were given were, his dad bribed Knox's way into school (which wasn't Knox's fault and it was even mentioned multiple times that he was a better cook than Rowan and deserved to be at the school), that he pulled pranks on her at school which we were supposed to dislike him for but Rowan also did this to him so are we supposed to dislike her as well or was it ok for her to do? Ans that was it for their relationship backstory. In the present timeline Know was nothing but a nice guy, he wasn't mad when Rowan stole from him, he gave her his knives when she forgot to sharpen them due to her being distracted but her stealing from him, he helped her when her mother had a bad turn due to her illness and stayed with her to comfort her. The only time we even see him be this mean guy that Rowan kept talking about was when he was a dick to Mike and that was only because he was jealous of Mike going on a date with her. 

When I wasn't annoyed or frustrated with the characters I was just plain bored, I didn't care who won the competition and I didn't care what happed relationship wise. 

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