All it takes is one smile from the gorgeous bartender for me to make up the dumbest lie I’ll ever tell.
Who pretends to be broke?
Apparently, I do because I’m no longer Peter Caruso, billionaire owner of All Out Brewery. I’m just the claustrophobic delivery driver Cara agrees to date.
Suddenly I’m walking up hundreds of stairs, skipping the expensive restaurants, and forgetting I can’t afford box seats to professional sporting events all to impress the woman who is quickly stealing my heart.
But when she finds out who I am, will I need to lock her in a pumpkin just to keep her.
Another cute and creative sexy nursery rhyme retelling from Kacie West (AKA Jenni Bara and A.J. Ranney)! And the formatting inside the book is also absolutely adorable–I loved how the main events of each chapter inspired the doodles at the beginning. Such a cute detail!
Peter Pumpkined Out is–of course-a loose retelling of “Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater.” This is a good thing, IMO, because–surely it’s not just me?–the actual rhyme is really…odd. The authors do manage to cleverly bring *one* of the lines into their story (not going to spoil it! You’ll have to read it yourself to see 😉 ), but other than a few other pumpkin references and the fact that the hero’s name is Peter, it’s essentially its own story and that’s fine.
Well, its own story that is also related to other books by the authors–it’s in the same universe as the other “smutty nursery rhymes” by Kacie; Peter is friends with Along Came the Girl ‘s Owen, who he is playing chess with via text here. If you’ve read Ms Bara’s More Than A Hero –where the Kacie West pen name comes from–this story is what Morgan (AKA the “Kacie West” who lives in Jenni Bara’s fictional Evans Family universe) was writing during that book.
It’s a super fun scene–if you don’t remember it, no worries, because Ms Ranney lets us know which one it is in the author’s note at the end and even if you’re reading this as a standalone, it’s still a lot of fun on its own.
I wasn’t the biggest fan of Peter in the beginning–he’s a major jerk, so we’re not really supposed to–but meeting Cara inspires him to be a better guy, and fortunately for everyone, it sticks. Cara’s an admirable heroine–the law student who’s working as a bartender to make ends meet and doesn’t let Peter’s wealth (once she knows he has it, that is!) change her–and it was easy to root for her from the beginning.
Though I did enjoy this story overall, it made me a little crazy that so much of the “com” of this particular rom com depended on Peter and Cara not discussing a particular misconception that their meet cute leaves him with
It went on for way too long to really make sense, and it did end up influencing my rating.
And don’t get me wrong, I *love* that the authors decided to write the stories that Jenni Bara’s fictional character and romance author Morgan supposedly writes–such a fun idea! But why would Morgan, who has now become a member of the Evans family, be putting the Evanses (Danny Evans was Peter’s college roommate and is still his BBF here with plenty of page time) and her universe’s “real life” Metros baseball team and its players into her fictional romances? That just will never make sense to me. It didn’t effect my rating, but it does make me kinda crazy while reading, this book perhaps more than the others. I get wanting to have callbacks to other books/series in your books, but this is supposed to be Morgan’s book. Just its existence is the callback.
But I digress.
The author’s note tells us that we have Humpty Dumpty and the Little Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe to look forward to next year, and I can’t wait to see how those childhood classics are adapted into a modern day rom com!
Rating: 3 1/2 stars / B
I voluntarily reviewed an Advance Reader Copy of this book.