Wartime Brides and Wedding Cakes by Amy Miller @AmyBratley1 @bookouture #blogtour

Delighted to host a stop on the blog tour for Wartime Brides and Wedding Cakes by Amy Miller today! My thanks to Kim Nash at Bookouture for the opportunity and the review copy!

Author : Amy Miller
Title : Wartime Brides and Wedding Cakes
Series : Wartime Bakery #2
Pages : 230
Publisher : Bookouture
Publication date : March 7, 2018

January 1941: As Charlie Barton tiptoes silently out of the house one cold winter morning to go off and fight for his country, his wife Audrey is left to run the family bakery on her own.

Times are tougher than ever, but at the Barton Bakery in Bournemouth, Audrey is determined as always to serve the town with love, loaves and cakes, even as the town is reeling from the struggles of the Blitz.

Audrey’s brother William has returned from battle with serious wounds. His fiancé Elsie is waiting for wedding bells, but William is a changed man, and will her hopes be in vain?

Bakery helper Maggie has her heart set on dashing officer George. But will George still want to marry her when he discovers the truth about her family?

And Lily, Audrey’s stepsister, is struggling to raise her illegitimate baby and facing judgement from many in the town. The man who broke her heart returns with an offer, and Lily faces a hard decision about where her future lies.

When disaster strikes the bakery, Audrey fears that everything she has worked for may be ruined. With her shop threatened and her family in turmoil, can she fight to save everything she holds dear?

If you’ve been following my reviews, then you know this isn’t exactly the type of book I tend to go for but as soon as I finished the previous book in the series, Heartaches and Christmas Cakes, I knew I couldn’t wait to catch up with Audrey and her family and friends again. All these characters wormed their way into my heart from the beginning and I very much care about what happens to them.

Audrey’s husband Charlie has gone off to war, leaving her and Uncle John to run the bakery. Meanwhile Audrey’s brother William has returned injured and is clearly struggling with something, while stepsister Lily is having a tough time dealing with motherhood. On top of that, either Audrey is losing her mind or someone has been stealing her supplies. But as we’ve learned in the first book, Audrey isn’t one to take things lying down and she will do whatever it takes to get her family through this war as unscathed as possible.

I find this series immensely entertaining and uplifting. Full of likeable characters, it’s incredibly easy to sympathise with them and their circumstances and I adore that the spotlight is very firmly on all the women who showed immense strength on a daily basis to make sure their families were safe, that there was food on the table, that they managed to find joy in the little things when the world around them was falling apart while all the time worrying about fathers, husbands and sons who were off fighting.

Audrey, her family and friends and indeed their entire little community are an inspiration to us all. As hard as the times were, life went on and they had to make the most of what they had. Life is short, you never know what tomorrow will bring so live for today. And in the case of this story, that does indeed include wartime brides and wedding cakes. I look forward immensely to catching up with these characters again in future!

Wartime Brides and Wedding Cakes is available for purchase!

Amazon US | Amazon UK | Goodreads

Amy Miller lives in Dorset with her husband and two children. New to saga, she has previously written women’s fiction under a different name.

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