A Brewed Awakening is another clean rom-com for adults, with small-town rivalries turning into forever love.
Main Themes
Daphne loves tea and pink, while Finn loves hearty pub food and rock music. They are both trying to grow their business and also trying very hard not to fall in love. The main trope of A Brewed Awakening was opposites attract, but the characters were super similar. They both loved family, cooking, running a small business, living in a small town, verbally sparring, playing practical jokes, and have similar issues with trust from past betrayals. And they were both looking for the exact same things in a relationship.
I think a better trope for this setting and group of characters would have been friends-to-more, since they had eyes only for each other from the moment they met, just with discordant moments of hating the other person for no apparent reason.
Pepper Basham does deliver very well in the humor department with her characteristic witty dialogue and humorous scenes. And there was a great plot twist at the end to add to some unexpected but very welcome action and suspense to the end of the novel.
Faith Elements
There was a joke about your soul realigning during a tea seance. It was very brief, but also unnecessary. (I will note here that I read an advanced reader’s copy, so I’m not sure if that joke was part of the final cut. I hope it didn’t. There were so many better jokes anyway.) Faith was not really present in this novel, although themes like caring fatherhood, loving your neighbors, and the importance of community were definitely prominent.
Family Friendly Considerations
A Brewed Awakening was very heavily focused on romance. Even though it was clean, I would consider the sheer volume of infatuation to be low spice reading and not suitable for younger readers. Not because it was dirty, but it’s so overwhelmingly focused on physical appearance and giving into raging hormones, which is not a good basis for commitment for younger readers to be absorbing. Sure, some scenes are fun and certainly swoon-worthy, but dessert still has to be consumed in small portions for a healthy diet.
Interest in Similar Reads?
If you enjoy romance-heavy plots, you might like these novels as well:
- More Than Friends by Denise Hunter
- Harbor Pointe by Irene Hannon
- The Neighbor Playbook by Kristine W. Joy
