Cake Icing, Butt Budder and Tea Lids (A Romantic Comedy)

By: Renee Andrews

Narrated by: Peggy Richardson

National Readers Choice Award Winner Cake Icing, Butt Budder and Tea Lids has been described as Sweet Home Alabama, Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Practical Magic, and Steel Magnolias all rolled into one. "In the South, if a woman isn't married by age twenty-five, it's time for an intervention." This is the basis behind Delilah and Edna Thibodeaux's dogged determination to make sure their beloved Jezze doesn't end up an old spinster, like her mother and aunt.

But what happens when the eccentric antics of the young girl's crazy Cajun aunt and mother put her search for Mr. Right on a 25-year deadline to potential disaster? And why should she have to prove that they are the experts in marriage intervention, anyway? Because she loves them? Yeah, probably. Because they really don't mean any harm? That too. But when they decide her Mr. Right is T-Roy Bertrand, the butt budder salesman, does she really have to agree? And if she's made up her mind, why does her heart refuse to listen?

©2011 Renee Andrews (P)2013 Renee Andrews

Can a book be too sweet?!? Yes, it Can!!!

I should admit upfront I’m not a glass is “half-full” kind of girl and this book is definitely for those “half-full” type of people. So that should explain the two-star rating from me. This book is just too much good stuff and even the drama is solved before the end of the chapter – totally not realistic. I know I know fiction doesn’t have to be realistic and like I said this book is for someone else.

This book is a story of a girl’s life and the influence the folks around her have on her but when the synopsis says 25-year-old Jezebel Thibodeaux you would expect her to be 25 years old before the last two/three chapters in the book. This book is slow going and I mean slow. There is a whole chapter about the new employee at the cakery but the story spends less than a 1/3 of a chapter on a cancer reveal. I just didn’t get the authors point. I also didn’t like the whole her life isn’t complete until she finds her right-man. I guess the feminist in me just thinks there is more to a woman than finding her right-man by age 25.

Another deterrent to the story is the narrator, Peggy Richardson. She does a fabulous job with the accent but every character sounds exactly the same and there are several times when I have no idea who is speaking because they all have the same accent and inflection on words.