I wanted to like this book more. I really did.

We have a young black girl in Paris fulfilling her dreams of studying abroad, and putting on a one woman show in honor of her inspiration Josephine Baker.

That premise alone got me into the book. As someone who did a few papers about Josephine Baker in high school, I couldn’t wait to read this book!

But one I started to read into it things, and I’m about 60% into the book, this book feels like an amalgamation of different ideas for the same story, but they were stitch together very loosely.

The romance between Whitney and Thierry started off abruptly and very rocky, and it felt unnecessary for it to start off that way? And then the distain her roommates had towards her after she introduced herself and then they just stopped talking to her felt too obvious to a plot point being made.

We don’t get too much of Whitney actually working on her show or her research project, but we also don’t get too much of the romance aspect between her and Thierry until the last 70 pages??? mind you this books is very short. And the romance between them was very very cute. Yes it was a rough start but you can see the crush starting to form between them, and it was very sweet and sincere. I was hoping to get more of that!

I can say my favorite part was reading Whitney getting her braids done. I’ve never in my years of reading (which I’m absolutely surprised) came across a book that just had a little part of the black girl experience of getting braids done… it was kind of therapeutic to read.

Love Requires Chocolate (Love in Translation #1)

Ravynn K. Stringfield