Last year, I made a chocolate honey cake. The cake was chocolate and honey, the filling had honey and mascarpone, and the icing was, you guessed it, honey and dark chocolate. I almost gagged on it, it was so sweet. It's a shame, because the ingredients were all delicious and if I'd just left honey out of two of the three components, it would have been perfect. This is exactly how I feel about this cake book. The prose is well-crafted, even lyrical. The characters are a bit generic, but might have been fine in another book. But the tone of the whole and the machinations of the plot veer towards treacly, and I just couldn't appreciate any of its good points. So I'll leave the extolling of Van Booy's many writerly virtues to other people and just say, if you, like me, have a limited literary sweet tooth, stay away! I'm going to go eat a kale salad now.