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~**~ Blog Tour for Baking Me Crazy (Donner Bakery #1) by Karla Sorensen w/ Excerpt & Review ~**~

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By kahea

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"Friends to lovers at its best-- a sweet indulgence I couldn’t put down!” - R.S. Grey, USA Today Bestselling Author

Baking Me Crazy, the first in the romantic comedy Donner Bakery Series of standalones, from Karla Sorensen is available now!

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I'm Levi Buchanan, and until five years ago, I thought the legend of my family's curse was a load of crazy, Southern nonsense.
No curse can make you fall in love at first sight. No curse can force a true, deep, passionate, all-consuming love that will haunt you all the days of your life.
Then I met Jocelyn Abernathy and I realized how completely wrong I was.
The problem is, Jocelyn guards her feelings like well-armed soldier. She's the most beautiful, stubborn, infuriating woman I've ever met. Every time she talks, I want to kiss the living daylights out of her. But I can't.
Because when we met, she didn't need true love. She needed a best friend. And that's what I've been to her... for five years.
But when Jocelyn meets a handsome stranger her first day working at Donner Bakery and she lets him buy her a dill pickle cupcake, I realize with ominous regret that I may have missed my window with my best friend.
If I can't get her to see past our friendship, my new curse may be to watch the love of my life move on with someone else.
'Baking Me Crazy' is a full-length contemporary romantic comedy, can be read as a standalone, and is book#1 in the Donner Bakery series, Green Valley World, Penny Reid Book Universe.
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Download your copy today!
Amazon Worldwide: http://mybook.to/BakingMeCrazy
Google Play: http://bit.ly/2klKiUj
Add to GoodReads: http://bit.ly/2ku91Wg


"Besides, this is my best friend perk. Shouldn't I get perks in baked goods?"
She cut me a look. "You've been getting those perks for two years, Buchanan. Don't even pretend you didn't put on a solid ten pounds that first year I started baking." Quite pointedly, she looked at my stomach, which we both knew was covered in muscle.
“That's rude," I mumbled under my breath. I flexed my bicep. Nero licked my elbow since it was right in front of him. "Yeah, ten pounds in my left arm maybe."
The noise she made roughly translated to you are ridiculous. She made that sound at me a lot. Of course, the sad truth of the matter was that I was ridiculous.
Not once in the past five years had my feelings lessened for her. I had just learned to live with them. In my junior year of undergrad, I was taking a class on brain pathology in injuries, and a man came to talk to us about how he learned to live without his right arm after it was amputated.
He told us about how, even years after he lost his arm, his brain still triggered sensations to the limb that was no longer there. The adult brain, in particular, struggled to reorganize after the loss of a limb, and given that four out of five amputees suffer from phantom pain symptoms, some of which were incredibly debilitating, it was a lesson that stuck with me.
I wasn't fool enough to think that me loving Jocelyn was on par with a man who’d lost his arm, but something about the way he talked plucked at a chord inside me. Sometimes my brain struggled to remember that we were just friends.
She'd never dated, never even hinted that she wanted to. She'd never given me a longing glance. Never stared at my mouth like she wondered what it tasted like.
But my hands never, not once, stopped wanting to reach for hers. My fingers always, always itched to dig into her crazy hair and see what the curve of her scalp felt like.
My brain knew what this relationship was, but sometimes, the signals it sent to the rest of my body didn't always match up with the truth of our situation. We worked out together a lot, Joss and I, and when she got frustrated with the limitations of her body, I always wanted to wrap my arms around her.
I wanted to pull her into the curve of my body, absorb her dissatisfaction into my skin, and carry it for her. That was the irony when she made noises like that.
She had absolutely no clue how ridiculous I really was.

***4.5 Stars***

I’ll admit that it took a bit for me to really get into it (I blame it on the cold I caught thanks to my coworker ~ sinus issues are never fun) but even from the start, I wanted to know more about Levi, Joss and spend time in one of my favorite literary worlds with the hope that I’d get to see a few familiar faces, and I definitely got that and more. This turned out to be a fun friends to lovers read that had a whole lot of heart and just enough drama to keep things interesting and me turning the pages until the very end.

I adored Levi and Joss. He’s sweet, charming and has a golden heart. All in all, he is simply good people. Joss is a fighter. She was dealt a blow at a young age, but forced herself to live ~ even if it has only been a semblance of it. She has mile high walls and is a little awkward because of them, but all in all she is a good person who is slowly learning that she wants more in life than what she’s allowed herself thus far.

As for their friends to lovers romance. I have to say that I loved the premise of it. It’s sweet, quirky and so very true to Green Valley that I loved watching everything play out between Joss and Levi. Their friendship was so strong that I had no doubt that they’d find their way to being more, even during those moments of wanting to Gibbs smack some sense into one of them, and in the end I loved where they both found themselves.

This is my first read by the author and it was a great experience. The writing was engaging and I thoroughly enjoyed the dual first person POV’s. A bunch of new characters were introduced and I’m crossing my toes that we’ll see them again in one form or another as this world expands.

~ Copy provided by Social Butterfly PR & voluntarily reviewed ~

About Karla Sorensen
Karla Sorensen has been an avid reader her entire life, preferring stories with a happily-ever-after over just about any other kind. And considering she has an entire line item in her budget for books, she realized it might just be cheaper to write her own stories. It doesn’t take much to keep her happy…a book, a really big glass of wine, and at least thirty minutes of complete silence every day. She still keeps her toes in the world of health care marketing, where she made her living pre-babies. Now she stays home, writing and mommy-ing full time (this translates to almost every day being a ‘pajama day’ at the Sorensen household…don’t judge). She lives in West Michigan with her husband, two exceptionally adorable sons and big, shaggy rescue dog.
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