Book Review: Sweet Tea
I received this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Author: Piper Huguley
Genre: Romance
Publisher: Hallmark Publishing
Publish Date: July 13, 2021
Format: eBook
★★★★★
This book is perfect for those that like: Enemies-to-Lovers, Small Town Settings, Grandmother's Full of Wisdom, and Family Histories That Run Deep.
You might not like this book if you aren’t into: Parental Death, or Scenes Detailing Anxiety and/or Panic Attacks.
Purchase: IndieBound / Barnes & Noble / Amazon
Summary: Althea Dailey has succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. So why doesn’t she feel more excited about it? She’s about to become the only woman—and the only Black person—to make partner at her prestigious law firm in New York City. When she has to travel South for a case, she pays a long-overdue visit back home to Milford, Georgia. To her surprise, a white man she’s never met has befriended her grandmother.
Jack Darwent wasn’t interested in the definition of success dictated by his father and Southern high society. His passion for cooking led him to his current project: a documentary and cookbook about authentic Southern food. Althea’s grandmother is famous for her cooking at the historically Black Milford College, especially the annual May feast meal. But Althea suspects Jack of trying to steal her grandmother’s recipes.
Although Althea and Jack don’t have the best first impressions of one another, they discover they have more in common than they’d guessed…and even as they learn about one another’s pasts, they both see glimmers of a better future.
There are books that you enjoy and there are books that you love and shout about to anyone who will listen and then there are books that become a part of you. They claim a piece of your heart and never let go and you find yourself grateful that you got to read them and almost panic at the thought that you might never have. Y’all, that’s what Sweet Tea was for me. I wasn’t prepared for how much this story would mean to me. How much I would fall in love with Althea, aka Tea.
I can’t claim to understand the depths of growing up and eventually leaving a place with so much history and impact on one's life, but as a person with anxiety and who also left her hometown and has yet to go back, Tea's anxiety, pain, anger, and resentment, hit me hard. Those feelings were like looking into a mirror and there were times when I was genuinely breathless and tearing up for Tea. So much of her story was like my own. Her relationship with Granda reminded me of my own painful, complicated relationships with some of my own family members, and seeing those wounds mended was beautiful.
Watching Tea and Jack learn to trust one another, then rely on each other, and then come to fall in love was the icing on the cake. Truthfully, I would have loved the book just for their story alone, because I love a good enemies-to-lovers trope, but this book was so much more than that. These were two deeply lonely people who were both looking for their anchor in the world and they found it in each other and y’all, I did - I gasped at scenes and legit cried in some. I won’t tell you which they were because I want you all to feel those OMG moments for the first time, just like I was able to.
This story, while a stand-alone contemporary romance, could be part of Piper Huguley's Home to Milford College Series, a historical romance series set in the late 1800s. The characters in that series, Virgil Smithson and Amanda Stewart are the backbones of Althea's history. I confess I have not read the Milford College Series, but I plan on it as I think it will add a whole new layer to Sweet Tea.