Welcome to the June 14th stop on the blog tour for Bake Believe by Cori Cooper, organized by Bewitching Book Tours. Be sure to follow the rest of the tour for spotlights, reviews, and author guest posts & interviews!
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About the Book
Bake Believe
by Cori Cooper
Published 3 November 2020
Immortal Works Publishing
Cover Artist: Immortal Works Art Team
Genre: YA Magical Realism
Page Count: 282
Add it to your Goodreads TBR!
What happens when you combine Magic and Baking? Cat Anderson will tell you all about it.
Cat Anderson doesn’t want much out of life. Give her a circle of friends to giggle with, a few boys to flirt with, a cute outfit, and she is good to go! She especially could care less about food.
But food, it turns out, is a very big deal.
In Cat’s family there is a secret too fantastic to be real. Something happens when Cat bakes.
Something amazing.
Something impossible.
Can it be true? Or is it Bake Believe?
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Excerpt
Why am I still in bed?
It’s the last day of summer vacation! I can’t waste one more minute, second, or millisecond sleeping. This is going to be the most epically awesome day of all time! Like, so good that awesome looks at this day and wishes it was this epic. This might sound like a lot of pressure, but I’m ready. For weeks I’ve been keeping track of the summer stuff I love to do most, so I could pick out all the best things. Now, I have a mental list just waiting for me to get to it:
-Go to the pool.
-Use sun lightener on my hair.
-Work on my tan.
-Try something new at the Snack Shack.
-Meet three new boys.
-Give at least one of the boys my phone number.
I am determined to squeeze the most amount of fun out of every single second of this day. Obviously, I can’t get any of it done while I’m laying here like a slug! I have to get up and call Robyn.
I roll out of bed, no clue what time it is. My stinking alarm clock has been tick-tick-ticking away the precious minutes of my last summer day, so I have been ignoring it with all of my might. Before I stand up, I smack the clock face down on the nightstand. I should have done that before. The irritating neon numbers, winking in my peripheral, were giving me a headache.
And headaches are not epically awesome.
I wonder, would Time stop if I use all my allowance to send it on a vacation to Hawaii? I can find a beachfront resort somewhere far away from me and Time can sit next to the ocean with a fruity little drink. I wouldn’t mind if Time decided to stay there for a couple weeks even. This could totally work. Even Time must need a break sometimes.
Or maybe not, since that darn clock is still going at it, just muffled now.
I plop my pillow down on my nightstand, to shush it even more, and I tiptoe to my bedroom door. As quietly as possible, I ease it open, so it doesn’t squeak. It does like to squeak sometimes, and I don’t want to wake anyone up in case it’s super early. For all that trying to ignore the clock’s tick-tocks, I didn’t actually look at the time.
I’ll just check when I get my phone.
Because of the family ‘no screens in bedrooms’ rule, my phone spends the night in a basket on the coffee table. Out of habit, I look both ways before I slip out of my room and into the hall. Not a creature is stirring. Even so, I prefer to sneak along the walls and slink around corners like I’m in some big deal spy movie. It’s just more fun that way. I serpentine down the stairs and army crawl across the living room. When I’m almost to the coffee table, I execute a super awesome somersault that leaves me on my back, staring up at the phone basket.
Nailed it.
I reach one arm into the basket and rummage around until I feel sequins. My phone! The most beautiful creation of turquoise and silver sparkles, I am very happy to have it in my hand. I hold the phone above my head, over my face, while I text. My arms start to fall asleep instantly, but I ignore them, because this is super important.
My Review
My Rating: 5 Stars
Consider liking my review on Goodreads.
I was granted complimentary access to Bake Believe as part of my participation in a blog tour for this title with Bewitching Book Tours. Thank you to all involved in affording me this opportunity! My thoughts are my own and my review is honest.
Cat’s family doesn’t cook. Or bake. Or anything that resembles cooking or baking. Everything Cat has ever eaten at home has come from a box. Why? Well, after something strange happens in eighth grade cooking class, Cat is about to find out!
This book is like a cross between Elizabeth Acevedo’s With the Fire on High and the Pixieland Diaries books by Christina Bauer. It’s the great food, recipes included, and latina cultural infusion of With the Fire of High plus the perfectly captured impulsive whimsy of teenage girlhood of Christina Bauer’s young characters. Perfect! Cat is exactly like every happy 8th grade girl I’ve ever met, especially when doing what she’s passionate about, and I love the fact that the book doesn’t feature so much present decade technology (like many YA books do these days) that I’m constantly reminded that my high school experience was in a different time. I think if Cat and I were in the same grade at the same school we definitely would have been friends.
This book feels like its meant to have a mystery element to it, but it’s too drawn out to successfully be a mystery. Fortunately it isn’t billed a cozy mystery or anything like that, so that’s not really a problem, but let’s just say that by the time Cat finally gets that answer as to why her mother doesn’t bake at home, the very first question asked in chapter one, the reader has more than already figured it out.
I really love the fact that this is a magical realism story. That’s not something I see a whole lot of in YA these days. It’s all contemporary fiction grounded entirely in reality or all-out fantasy with complex magic systems and supernatural creatures. Nothing wrong with any of that, but I absolutely love magical realism, and it’s really nice to see that paired with a Bauer-esque teen protagonist.
If you like YA and magical realism, you NEED to read this book!
About the Author
Cori Cooper lives in the magical Arizona Mountains, which she’s pretty convinced is the setting for all the fairy tales.
Besides writing stories, she adores hanging out with her family, playing board games, hiking and baking, baking, baking. Like Cat’s family, she’s positive Cinnamon Rolls fix everything.
You can connect with Cori on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads and her website – Coristories.com.
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Tour Schedule
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This sounds like such a fun read, especially for YA readers! Thanks for sharing.