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A review by indiekay
The Dos and Donuts of Love by Adiba Jaigirdar
4.0
Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC of the audiobook.
I'll be honest, when I saw the cover I thought this book was going to be a middle-grade story, just because the illustration style is quite young-looking and it's SO colourful - and also when I hear "Junior Baking Show" I think the contestants are all going to be around 10-13. I was quite surprised when reading it to find out the characters are all 17, and had to keep reminding myself that they were 17, because to me the story felt like it might have worked better if they were younger.
I also have a pet peeve when it comes to reality TV show books, in that I haaate when it feels like the author did absolutely no research on how tv shows are filmed and the production time for them. There's usually about a year between filming and when the shows get aired, for example. You can't talk about how reality TV producers love to create narratives in the show and make some characters villains, and then have a show air immediately after filming - it's impossible for a show to create narratives like that if they haven't already filmed the whole show in advance and have the ability to pick and chose what shots to include in the edit of every single episode of the season so it creates a cohesive story! You can't decide ep 1 that this character is going to be the villain, and then they get voted out the very next week!
In this book's case it felt like the author specifically chose to just ignore all those rules about how tv is filmed to suit the narrative, WHICH IS FINE, but I wish there'd been something near the beginning along the lines of "this show was filmed differently than other reality tv shows, in that each episode was aired the same week of filming". Just adding in that information would have helped me with my suspension of disbelieve a LOT.
So, I was kind of distracted with how the rules of this baking show actually worked for most of the book. But honestly I really liked the end of the story and how everything wraps up, and the ending definitely pushed this from a 3 star to a 4 star for me. It tackles a few difficult topics - there's some fatphobia in here, but it's not TOO heavy, which is great (the author even says in a note at the end that the book was originally going to be VERY heavy on the fatphobia and she decided to tone that down a bit) - Shireen never has to deal with any fatphobia from her friends or family, and there's 0 homophobia in here at all.
Racism definitely plays a big roll in the story. Shireen and Chris both deal with racism from the audience of the show, and Shireen deals with microaggressions like the host of the show not pronouncing her name correctly, or being called Indian when she's Bangladeshi. And one character even says to Shireen that being called ginger is similar to a racial slur. Um, no the fuck it is not.
I wasn't hugely invested in the romance elements of the story, to be honest, but I was kind of annoyed to see the alternative cover of this book that only has 2 characters on the front instead of 3, which totally spoiled the love triangle element of it. But, I was not mad about how the romance played out, and like I said, was very satisfied with the ending.
I'll be honest, when I saw the cover I thought this book was going to be a middle-grade story, just because the illustration style is quite young-looking and it's SO colourful - and also when I hear "Junior Baking Show" I think the contestants are all going to be around 10-13. I was quite surprised when reading it to find out the characters are all 17, and had to keep reminding myself that they were 17, because to me the story felt like it might have worked better if they were younger.
I also have a pet peeve when it comes to reality TV show books, in that I haaate when it feels like the author did absolutely no research on how tv shows are filmed and the production time for them. There's usually about a year between filming and when the shows get aired, for example. You can't talk about how reality TV producers love to create narratives in the show and make some characters villains, and then have a show air immediately after filming - it's impossible for a show to create narratives like that if they haven't already filmed the whole show in advance and have the ability to pick and chose what shots to include in the edit of every single episode of the season so it creates a cohesive story! You can't decide ep 1 that this character is going to be the villain, and then they get voted out the very next week!
In this book's case it felt like the author specifically chose to just ignore all those rules about how tv is filmed to suit the narrative, WHICH IS FINE, but I wish there'd been something near the beginning along the lines of "this show was filmed differently than other reality tv shows, in that each episode was aired the same week of filming". Just adding in that information would have helped me with my suspension of disbelieve a LOT.
So, I was kind of distracted with how the rules of this baking show actually worked for most of the book. But honestly I really liked the end of the story and how everything wraps up, and the ending definitely pushed this from a 3 star to a 4 star for me. It tackles a few difficult topics - there's some fatphobia in here, but it's not TOO heavy, which is great (the author even says in a note at the end that the book was originally going to be VERY heavy on the fatphobia and she decided to tone that down a bit) - Shireen never has to deal with any fatphobia from her friends or family, and there's 0 homophobia in here at all.
Racism definitely plays a big roll in the story. Shireen and Chris both deal with racism from the audience of the show, and Shireen deals with microaggressions like the host of the show not pronouncing her name correctly, or being called Indian when she's Bangladeshi. And one character even says to Shireen that being called ginger is similar to a racial slur. Um, no the fuck it is not.
I wasn't hugely invested in the romance elements of the story, to be honest, but I was kind of annoyed to see the alternative cover of this book that only has 2 characters on the front instead of 3, which totally spoiled the love triangle element of it. But, I was not mad about how the romance played out, and like I said, was very satisfied with the ending.