Anything But Vanilla is a Harlequin Kiss romance about Alex and Sorrel, who bicker over running an ice cream shop. The ice cream added a nice comfort read quality to the book, but tragically all the parts of the book that did not involve ice cream were sexist, nonsensical, or both.
Sorrel runs Scoop!, an ice cream catering, entertainment, and delivery company. Sorrel gets the ice cream for her business from Ria, who owns a gourmet ice cream shop. The book begins when Sorrel shows up to pick up the ice cream she needs for an event, only to find no ice cream and no Ria. Instead, Alex, a friend of Ria’s, is there, going through paperwork and being as cranky as anyone in an ice cream store can possibly be. It seems that Ria has not been paying any of her bills, including her taxes. Alex says the store has to close, Sorrel says no way, and they commence to bickering over the business.
The romance unfolds over a short period of time as they work together to save the store. Initially Alex can’t take Sorrel seriously because the first time they meet she is wearing a tight skirt and a spaghetti-strap top. Alex’s repeated comments both to himself and out loud to Sorrel about her clothes made me wild with rage. Eventually, Alex realizes that even though she wears cute outfits, she’s also really smart. He becomes her champion, and they bond over emotional issues. Also he teaches her to like sex. I was so furious with Alex’s judging Sorrel’s intelligence by the neckline of her top and with Sorrel’s sexual issues that I ended up needing to eat a pint of ice cream myself just to calm the hell down. Sorrel’s sexual issues are too involved for me to list here but frankly they don’t make a lot of sense anyway. They exist only so that she can have the experience of being sexually initiated by Her Man, a trope I am 100% over already.
This romance left me with some unanswered questions:
- Why is Sorrel not furious with Ria? She seems pretty blasé about the whole “Ria has left without telling anyone where she’s going thus leaving Sorrel totally screwed” thing. Does Ria put tranquilizers in the ice cream? If so, can I have some?
- Are Sorrel and Graeme dating? Early on, we meet Graeme, a super uptight guy who seems determined to mold Sorrel into Wife Material. I never understood whether they were in a committed relationship or not. If they are, then Sorrel is totally cheating on Graeme, or at least considering cheating on Graeme, which is shitty. If they aren’t, then Graeme is grooming her for marriage without even dating her first. If there’s anything ickier than trying to turn your girlfriend into wife material, it’s trying to turn some random person into wife material by following them around until they become sufficiently perfect for you to date. Graeme is definitely a pain in the ass, but the question of just how much of a jerk Sorrel is remains open.
- Does Sorrel’s business plan include branching out into other cute gourmet desserts should the ice cream wave taper off? What if next year companies say to her, “We did gourmet savory ice cream at our corporate retreat last year so this year we want something different?” What if next year the Big Thing is candied pretzels, or marzipan, or interestingly flavored toffees? Adapt or die, Sorrel.
- Why does the book prove 5000 times that Sorrel is good at what she does whereas almost no attempt is made to show that Alex is good at what he does? Could it be….SEXISM? Maybe Alex is a shitty botanist. We’ll never know.
- And BY THE WAY, I have a huge thing for science heroes but Alex doesn’t science much. Nor does he have the way of looking at the world that scientists so often do. In my experience, scientists, and I know a lot of them, are a diverse lot in every possible way, but they all have a particular, analytical way of seeing things. Alex is just a hot guy in a tight T-shirt who travels a lot.
- I don’t get the ending. Is Alex still going to travel the world studying botany? And if not, is Sorrel going to support them both by selling ice cream? I have doubts about this as a viable long-term plan.
I like battle of wits romances, so I enjoyed Sorrel and Alex’s verbal sparring matches. I also liked the fact that Sorrel tells Alex that while her family grows their own vegetables, it wasn’t originally because they were part of the locally-sourced foods movement; it was because they were poor. It’s a nice bit of reality in what is otherwise a very cutesy story. Some readers will find the adorable setting and Sorrel’s adorable house and her collection of adorably named relatives to be enchanting and other will find it cloying. I was in the perfect mood for a cutesy romance, but the sexism in this book combined with all the things that just didn’t make sense left me cold.
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Thanks!
I think I would have ragequit this one. Judgey heroes are not my bag. Thanks for the warning/review!
I can’t even with this. And I liked the ice cream catering idea. This could have been fun! Why make fun of the girl wearing a tank top? WHY?
I have managed not to throw my Kindle and break it. I can’t risk this.
I’m not sure I get this. Sorrel runs an ice cream catering business? But she doesn’t make her own ice cream?
So she gets the ice cream from just one supplier?
Why is Alex there? Why does his botany skills enable him to look over the accounts for a business?
I don’t think I could suspend my disbelief enough to get past the first chapter.
This is a sad thing to do to ice cream.
Ehhh yeah, I am going to skip this one. Bummer, because who doesn’t like a romance WITH some ice cream lol
The Harlequin Kiss series has yielded quite a few DNF reads for me.
I assumed from the title that this was going to be about BDSM people and was taken aback by the rabid wholesomeness. Heh.
Finally a romance with a botanist (I am a botanist) and it sounds terrible! Sad day.
@Cordy, I was extremely disappointed as well. I’d love to read a novel with kinky stuff or BDSM that took place in an ice cream shop or some other relatively ‘wholesome’ place, or featuring kinks that involved ice cream.
It’s a wonder that nobody picked up on the kinky implications of the title, or decided that it didn’t matter when they were naming the book. It’s like naming a book “Blowing Her Way Around New York” and having the book be about a flautist.
“Adapt or die, Sorrel.”
Unattractively snorting my coffee here.
“I was so furious with Alex’s judging Sorrel’s intelligence by the neckline of her top and with Sorrel’s sexual issues that I ended up needing to eat a pint of ice cream myself just to calm the hell down.”
LOL
Why does the book prove 5000 times that Sorrel is good at what she does whereas almost no attempt is made to show that Alex is good at what he does? Could it be….SEXISM?
Yes yes YES [praise hands emoji]
I recently bitched about this, that so many books bend over backwards to convince us (either through omniscient narration or through the hero POV) why the heroine is the #1 woman in the world and the only one for him, and meanwhile he’s just some guy who “appreciates her” and fills out his shorts nicely. It’s bogus and I hate it.
The book may very well suck, but your review made my day.
Thank-you!