My kingdom for a 5 star romance. Finally! This was so good and needed. I was despairing you guys. I just wanted something romantic, with a plot, and a main character I could root for. This is not my first book by Tieu and it won’t be my last. I just started re-reading her backlist since I enjoyed The Girl Most Likely To. Be warned, you are going to get frustrated with the main character of Jas, but root for her throughout. We get a HEA in the end that was very much a nice slow/build that had me rooting for the love interest too. Some readers may think it’s too slow, but honestly, with some of the things I have read lately, it was much appreciated that Tieu took their time developing the characters and plot.
The Donut Trap follows Jasmine (Jas) Tran. A year after graduation from college, she is still working at her parents donut shop and has zero prospects of a boyfriend. She feels stuck, but doesn’t know what to do since her parents need her help and her younger brother is away about to start a prestigious internship. When her best friend pushes her to meet a guy Jas found cute, Alex and finds herself wanting not just him, but more than making donuts everyday and going home immediately afterwards.
Most of the book honestly is tension between Jas and her parents expectations. But we also get a reveal (towards the end) about what was going on with Jas, why her parents were being the way they were, and even why her best friend was pushing her. It explained a lot, and I would say it may have been better to move that up a bit because before then I was like good lord Jas is working my nerves here. It’s very much explained and I felt for the character. I thought Tieu also did a great job developing Alex. There is some discussion of things I really didn’t have a full appreciation for outside of history class (Khmer Rouge) thatI thought Tieu did a great job with. I was fascinated by so much I got to see in this book. We have secondary characters like Linh (Jas’s best friend), her brother, college friends, etc. that I thought were included in ways that made sense and did not slow down the story at all.
I thought the flow was great and though there is a slow build to the main relationship, as I said above it did not bother me at all.
The setting of the book is L.A., but I think Tieu makes it feel personable and we get a lot of food shoutouts (and I know really do want a donut…I am on the world’s worst restricted diet and I miss anything with flavor) and discussions of baseball and hiking.
The ending was great. You get a HEA (at least I am calling it that) and you get a sense of where Jas’s future is headed.
