🌈Queerly Beloved
by Susie Dumond
Pub Date 5/3/22
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This is a #LGBTQ #romance set in 2013 Tulsa, OK. Amy a talented baker who is closeted in her conservative town so she can work in a successful bakery. But after they somehow find out they just fire her. Like because of religious freedom or something. Like wwJd, pretty sure it wasn’t that. 

“Then they will reply, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison and didn’t do anything to help you?’ Then he will answer, ‘I assure you that when you haven’t done it for one of the least of these, you haven’t done it for me.'”
MATTHEW 25:44 – 45

Just throwing a scripture in without context like everyone else seems to. I’m a Presbyterian all are welcome here Christian. So listening to this kind of hateful interpretation of religion and how it affects people’s lives when really love is love and how does anyones love life affect others lives personally. 

I love the idea of hiring a bridesmaid to lean on for the tricky issues instead of a relative who might say nope. Amy falls into that job right when she needs a job. This was still when gay marriage wasn’t legal and being gay was not accepted. Ok I guess in some places people are still bigots.

Amy really wants that fairytale after watching so many weddings and why can’t everyone love the magic of uniting two souls for life. Her dating Charley felt so much like my 20’s and her mistakes and heartache and seeing her out with someone else, I have felt all those shooting feelings of pain and joy. The highs and lows of new relationships are the best and worst. Her relationship with her friends Damian and Joel was perfect, perfect, perfect.

The epilogue of how her budding company evolved into 2023 and everyone’s relationships was the icing on the cake.

❓Do you have a favorite flavor of cupcake? There is a recipe for the characters Strawberry Champagne #Cupcakes that sound delicious.

✨ The renovated pool at the property we live at is finally opening on Saturday and this is one of the new chaise lounges outside the pool area.

Thank you randomhouse and netgalley for the e-ARC for my honest and voluntary review.

Synopsis:

A people-pleasing baker tries to find her place as a bridesmaid-for-hire . Will she finally find her happily ever after—and her own voice?

Amy, a semicloseted queer baker and bartender in mid-2010s Oklahoma, has spent a lifetime putting other people’s needs before her own. Until, that is, she’s fired from her job at a Christian bakery and turns her a one-off gig subbing in for a bridesmaid into a full-time business—thanks to her baking talents, crafting skills, and years watching rom-coms and Say Yes to the Dress. Between her new gig and meeting Charley, the attractive engineer who’s just moved to Tulsa, suddenly Amy’s found something— and someone—she actually wants.

Her tight-knit group of chosen family is thrilled that Amy is becoming her authentic self. But when her deep desire to please kicks into overdrive, Amy’s precarious balancing act strains her relationships to the breaking point, and she must decide what it looks like to be true to herself—and if she has the courage to try.