The City Baker's Guide to Country Living

June 20, 2016
At the outset of Miller’s endearing debut, 32-year-old pastry chef Olivia Rawlings loses her job after she drops a tray of baked Alaska and starts a fire at the prestigious Boston club where she works. In need of comfort, she heads to Guthrie, Vt., to visit her best friend, Hannah Doyle, who lands her a job at the nearby Sugar Maple, a picturesque inn owned by the stern yet protective Margaret Hurley. As Olivia adjusts to her new life, her growing attachment to Margaret’s friends, the McCrackens—especially Martin, the fiddle-playing son—prompts her return to banjo and folk music. But even as she settles in and joins a contra dance band, she struggles to navigate the secrets, gossip, and long-held animosities that animate the town. Miller, a pastry chef herself, writes about food with vivid detail, but her rhythmic prose is even crisper when her interests converge: “From the stage you could see the lattice pattern the dances made, the couples weaving in and out like fluted strips of piecrust.” Miller also excels at characterization, revealing her protagonist’s complex pasts in subtle ways. Even minor characters such as Alfred, Olivia’s coworker at the Sugar Maple, and Henry, the ailing McCracken patriarch, are sharply drawn and memorable. Throughout, the novel’s empathetic spirit and unhurried pace allow it to grapple with grief, family, and belonging, while keeping the focus on Olivia’s difficult decisions. Agent: Alexandra Machinist, ICM Partners.

June 1, 2016
Can a purple-haired pastry chef with a whisk and spatula tattoo on her derriere find happiness baking in rustic Vermont?After 32-year-old Olivia Rawlings, carrying a flambe dessert, accidentally sets fire to the swank private club in Boston where she works, she flees north to Guthrie, Vermont, where her best friend lives. By unlikely coincidence, there's an opening for a pastry chef at the picturesque Sugar Maple Inn nearby. Although she's a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America and has been nominated for a James Beard award, Olivia soon falls into step with her small-town colleagues, even the inn's prickly proprietor, Margaret Hurley, whose personality approximates biting "into a raw cranberry." Olivia whips up many a frangipane tart as she becomes enmeshed in the small town's intrigues. She becomes increasingly enamored of Martin McCracken, a laconic Seattle teacher and musician, who grew up in Guthrie but bolted to elude his close-knit family's smothering grasp and has now returned to help out with the farm since his father has cancer. Olivia, who has some weaknesses when it comes to both alcohol and men, discovers too late that Martin has a fiancee back home in Seattle. By then, Martin's mother and ailing father have become surrogate parents to Olivia, whose mother abandoned her as a baby. Meanwhile, no one in Guthrie seems to be bothered by Olivia's bizarre hair-color changes ("Manic Panic Atomic Turquoise," anyone?) and occasionally coarse language ("God, what is up that woman's butt?"). Will Olivia be able to hold on to the elusive Martin? Will she help Margaret win the prestigious annual apple pie competition at the Coventry County Fair? Debut novelist Miller, herself a Boston pastry chef, initially succeeds in making these small-town concerns engaging with her witty writing. But what starts out as homespun charm in the first half of the book becomes treacly in the second.A promising author who doesn't have the recipe quite right yet.

COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

March 1, 2016
Like her creator, Olivia Rawlings is a Boston-based pastry chef, though one doubts that Miller ever set an entire building alight while flambeing her signature dessert. After that little upset, Livvy seeks comfort in Guthrie, VT, settling down with peppy dog Salty when she's offered a job at the Sugar Maple Inn and falling for Martin McCracken, home to tend his ailing father. Dorman's imprint just gave us J. Ryan Stradal's "Kitchens of the Great Midwest."

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.