Peanut Butter Promise is part of the ‘Bake Sale Bachelors Season Two’ series. I’m not sure which book number it is because there’s another series with almost the same series title. The two main characters are Shaw, an Alpha who works at an animal shelter, and Caleb, an Omega. This book is told in first person from both men’s povs.



I enjoyed the plot of this story. It was about Shaw helping to raise money for the local hospital by baking his specialty cookies for the hospital charity event. The cookies are actually dog biscuits that he sells for the animal shelter where he works. Caleb is instructed to attend the event by his boss. Running late, the last cookie plate up for auction, along with a date with the baker of those cookies, are the doggie biscuits. Caleb wins, but unfortunately doesn’t realize they are doggie biscuits. Caleb has his date with Shaw and they start to hang out.

I mentioned I enjoyed the plot of the story, but I don’t think it was well executed and that’s because of the first-person narrative. Both Caleb and Shaw’s voices sounded very much alike. The only way to tell the difference was the labeling of the chapters with each characters’ name, and their environment and people they hung out with. I’ve read numerous books by this author team and this is one of the problems they have of not making each voice distinct. They still need to work on that. Next, there was a lot of monologue, and I mean a terribly lot of monologue. It was like listening to someone chatter about their thoughts about everything. What they saw, what someone looked like, what they felt, but not getting the characters to draw me in and feel. When I read a story, I want to feel the emotions, not listen to a character describe everything. I had to put the book down numerous times because my mind would wander with the endless internal chatter.

As to the characters themselves, I did like that Caleb had a career he was interested in. Previous stories I’ve read by this writing pair, the omegas were more interested in having babies and housekeeping. The authors have improved in giving omegas careers and ambitions. Shaw seemed a nice guy, and I could believe in the two men as a couple. The authors did a better job in this book of giving the characters a background than in other books I’ve read, so they improved there.

I liked that the authors made the alternate world more interesting in that there are women living in it! Too many other books I’ve read by this pair, it was like women did not exist in the alternate worlds. This world seems to be exactly like ours except, alpha males have knots and males and females exist, and omega males can get pregnant. For me, this story would have worked fine without the alpha/omega/mpreg additions.

Peanut Butter Promise had a good holiday feel to it and that’s what saved it for me from being a disappointment. If you don’t mind an endless amount of monologue, then this is a cute holiday story. I give this book, 3 Stars.



I received a free copy of this book via Booksprout and am voluntarily leaving a review.


( )