Review: The Sweetest Thing

The Sweetest Thing by Sasha Summers
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

2.3 stars 

I received this book for free in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. 

The moment Tansy saw him, he was hard-pressed not to grin. The reaction was a long-standing pattern. She'd glare. He'd smile. She'd fume. He'd laugh. It was the way they worked. Oil and water. 

Known as the Bee Girls of Honey Hill Farm, Aunts Mags and Camilla, older sister Tansy, Astrid, and youngest Rosemary are working to keep their family farm going. Weather has ruined a lot of their hives hurting their honey output and the annual Honey Festival with, their cash prize and contract offer with Healthy and Wholesome Markets for best honey, looks to be their only hope to save the farm. Tansy knows they'll be competing with their neighbors Texas Viking Honey, the family farm of her nemesis. Dane and Tansy were childhood rivals who almost had a thing in highschool until a misunderstanding separated them and they now can't stop spitting and clawing at each other. As family issues keep coming up and Tansy and Dane are forced to work together, that misunderstanding might finally be solved. 

“I think it would be in everyone's best interest if we---you and me---call a truce.” 

The Sweetest Thing is the start to the Honey Acres series set in Honey, Texas and focuses on the small town and in particular the families of the two bee farms. This was tagged as romance but the story seemed to want to focus on everything but that, I would call this family fiction or even small town fiction. Tansy is dealing with the financial struggles of the family farm, there's a good amount of backstory given to the Aunts and even a later big surprise character reveal tied into them, and then dancing around the outside of the core family are her feelings of animosity towards Dane. Dane is pretty much dealing with the same issues, family farm in trouble, his dad plays the villain, and his younger brother Leif is struggling and looking for guidance and love. Their beginning interactions are fairly immature with Dane trying to play the cool unaffected guy and riling Tansy up by annoyingly teasing her. Readers aren't immediately let in on what happened between them in highschool but it's obvious both think the other one is at fault. 

“Your eyes. They say what your mouth won't.” 

Around 30% a truce is called between the two because they have to work together to teach and monitor a club called the Junior Beekeepers, this helped immensely with making them more likable to read about. There were still all the other characters and their issues and backstories taking the focus though. Even though there were some high-stakes issues brought up, losing homes and when one of Tansy's aunts discusses the surprise character, they aren't quite emotionally felt and delivering impacts because of all the other characters getting their issues in there; it was a little first in a series with making sure all the characters were fully introduced. At 65% Dane was saying he loved Tansy and I couldn't really see why because all we really got from them was that Dane thought her smile was beautiful. The 70% mark then gave us the finally talking about the misunderstanding and for something that kept these two hating each other for years, it took about a paragraph to bring realizations and because of how Tansy should have figured it out, felt like a complete dud moment. 

It terrified him to admit it, but Tansy's laugh was the sweetest thing...ever. 

The whole story just had a very muted tone for me, there were some high-stakes issues but not really any emotion breathed into them. Dane's younger brother Leif's little secondary romance delivered more tingles than what was supposed to be the main romance. It was brought up over and over how Dane looked like Thor and had great muscles that his tight t-shirts showed off well, Tansy had a beautiful smile and pretty green eyes and that was basically the chunk of why they fell in love with each other (even with a Thor like looking lead, this was a kisses only romance). I wouldn't read this for the romance as it was more of an afterthought but if you're looking for a small-town fiction story, that focuses more on the whole family of the leads, this had a larger amount of characters, a muted tone not diving too deep into these issues and even 180 degree turn around by the “villain”, and the small-town gossip.

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