Incredibly cute new-adult love story with a generous serving of feminism

Thank you so much to TBR and Beyond Tours and Kaitlyn Hill for allowing me to be part of this experience and also providing me with a complimentary eARC and media kit!

Book Information

This summer, Reese Camden is trading sweet tea and Southern hospitality for cold brew and crisp coastal air. She’s landed her dream marketing internship at Friends of Flavor, a wildly popular cooking channel in Seattle. The only problem? Benny Beneventi, the relentlessly charming, backwards-baseball-cap-wearing culinary intern–and her main competition for the fall job.

Reese’s plan to keep work a No Feelings Zone crumbles like a day-old muffin when she and Benny are thrown together for a video shoot that goes viral, making them the internet’s newest ship. Audiences are hungry for more, and their bosses at Friends of Flavor are happy to deliver. Soon Reese and Benny are in an all-out food war, churning homemade ice cream, twisting soft pretzels, breaking eggs in an omelet showdown–while hundreds of thousands of viewers watch.

Reese can’t deny the chemistry between her and Benny. But the more their rivalry heats up, the harder it is to keep love on the back burner…

Purchase/Information Links:

• Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54629993-love-from-scratch
• Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0593379160/ref=x_gr_w_bb_sin?ie=UTF8&tag=x_gr_w_bb_sin_ca-20&linkCode=as2&camp=15121&creative=330641
• Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/love-from-scratch-kaitlyn-hill/1139798127?ean=9780593379165
• Book Depository: https://www.bookdepository.com/Love-from-Scratch-Kaitlyn-Hill/9780593487013?ref=grid-view&qid=1644339262088&sr=1-1
• Indigo: https://www.chapters.indigo.ca/en-ca/books/love-from-scratch/9780593379165-item.html?ikwid=love+from+scratch&ikwsec=Home&ikwidx=0#algoliaQueryId=96a320ba74ac8511d11fcf67539da636
• IndieBound: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780593379165

Content and Trigger Warnings

For a list of warnings, tropes, and representation for this book, check out its page on BookTriggerWarnings.com.

About the Author

Kaitlyn Hill is a writer, reader, and sweet tea enthusiast who believes that all the world is not, in fact, a stage, but a romance novel waiting to happen. Her debut novel Love from Scratch comes out 4/5/22 from Delacorte Press/Penguin Random House.

Kaitlyn has a BA in Sociology/Anthropology and German Studies, which means that she can tell you way too much about the Communist Manifesto in Karl Marx’s mother tongue. Before landing on writing, she worked in roles from city government intern in a small German town to Haunted Mansion Maid at Walt Disney World, and most recently, at her hometown public library.

Aside from books, Kaitlyn’s favorite things are giraffes, ABBA, and excessively long naps. She lives with her real life romance hero in Lexington, Kentucky.

Author Links:

• Website: https://thekaitlynhill.com/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekaitlynhill
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thekaitlynhill/
• Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/20525224.Kaitlyn_Hill

Review (no spoilers)

If you’d like to follow along with the rest of the tour, you can find the tour schedule here.

Y’all, this romance novel was so incredibly cute. I was literally grinning my face off at the end when a particular scene happened and that one scene single handedly elevated my rating half a star. I want to start off this review by mentioning that this is pegged as a YA romance novel, but I would definitely say it is a NA romance instead, as I’ve written above. The main characters are both 18 and recent high school graduates. The novel follows these two interns as they’re thrust into a sudden workplace partnership filming cooking videos under a segment titled Amateur Hour. I don’t know about you, but all of that screams new adult to me.

There are so many glorious tropes thrown into this one. We have workplace romance, food themes, and rivals/workplace competition. While there were a few tropes that I could have definitely done without such as workplace misogyny (a particularly taxing trope for me as a queer woman of color in a cis-het white male dominated field) and miscommunication (boo!), the main and supporting characters were just so lovely that I couldn’t really be upset for long.

One of the many things that I think this book handled really well was feminism. Misogyny and sexism in the workplace and on the internet is something that basically every woman can attest to. This book tackles this head on and fights back in a way that I was particularly proud of. We had some fantastic male allies come to bat as well as a healthy dose of women supporting women. While I do think it could become a bit preachy at times and that there could have been a bit more intersectionality with trans/non-binary folks, I thought it was really well handled.

This is definitely a book that I’ll file under comfort reads for future sad times. I see myself revisiting these characters and this story multiple times in my future.

Love From Scratch is out now, so if you’re interested, definitely check out some of the links listed above!