I wish that I knew how to properly articulate why I struggled to connect with this book, but honestly, I can’t. Every time I try to write something new for this review, I end up deleting it for fear that my criticisms are too harsh or just inaccurate. I think I feel a little disappointed because this book should (and did!) appeal to me for so many reasons—a Cuban-American teen chasing her dreams with a side of summer romance!!—but I ultimately just… never felt excited while reading, or felt like I could really connect with the book.

Despite being pretty lighthearted, this book is very stressful. Rubi has a lot of expectations placed on her and ends up needing to maintain some big lies for a majority of this book, so I spent a lot of the reading experience with tense shoulders and a clenched jaw. Even the more “lighthearted” moments with the love interest, Ryan, feel pretty small or even like an afterthought; their relationship blooms pretty quickly and with almost no real development. Sure, their scenes are pretty cute, but they’re pretty unimportant overall… to the point where I was kind of surprised that he even made it onto the cover. This book feels like less of a summer romance and more like a journey of self-discovery, complete with the classic “it’s not my dream, parent, it’s yours” line in the third act.

The ending of the book was very sweet, but I wish that there had been more moments of clarity and joy spread out. I’m sure that there will be many readers who love Rubi and her journey, and I’m glad that this book exists. I’m also excited to see what other books the author releases in the future!

One of the things I loved about this book is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously. There’s a lot of celebration of puns and baking and the goofy awkwardness of first relationships and love. I loved those parts of the story.

RUBI RAMOS’S RECIPE FOR SUCCESS has a lot more than that to offer, though. We experience the pressure Rubi faces in her parents’ expectations for her, and her conflicting desires for her own life. She wants to do what’s right by her parents and honor the sacrifices they’ve made for her. But she also wants to find a way to make room for her own dreams. The struggle felt so real.

The romantic elements of the story are really sweet. It’s a simpler plot element, so there’s not a lot of drama or big trope-y conflict. That made for kind of a refreshing read, actually.

I think fans of baking stories like SALT AND SUGAR by Rebecca Carvalho or sweet romances, like books by Kasie West will enjoy Rubi’s tale of culinary confections and family connections.

Note: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. All opinions my own.

A cute story about Rubi Ramos, a young woman in her senior year of high school and striving to live up to her parents' dream of sending her to Alma University. To make it there, she's got a "recipe" for what it will take. Yet, part of that recipe is taking away something she loves....baking and creating baked goods and she's struggling to fulfill that part of the equation.

Rubi struggles with some challenges along the way in trying to make her (or is it her parents') dreams come true. Can she make both things happen or will something have to be given up to find true happiness? She will eventually figure it out with the help of some friends and a very intriguing red haired boy who she falls in serious "like" with.

Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC. I voluntarily chose to review it and the opinions contained within are my own.

Rubi Ramos not only had a recipe for success but also a recipe into my heart. Connecting to a character is something only a few books can do, and this one was it.

Learning about Rubi’s heritage (as a fellow Caribbean girl) made me so so happy. Her parent’s struggles to move to United States and to keep their businesses good and going where a good reminder of how immigrant parents always look for the best for their children.

The relationship Rubi had with her parents, herself and her friends was a very real one. That, along with the stories from Cuba, made it much easier for me to feel her as not only a good character but a person, a friend.

The romance that takes place in the book is fast paced yet romantic and very very beautiful. It had me smiling from ear to ear.

It was truly a pleasure reading this book and I’m looking forward for more!

This book was so cute and so fun. Rubi is such a fantastic characters and it was fun to see her discover herself. We almost could have done without the romance aspect, but it was cute too so all good. This book will make you hungry, have pastries ready!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

𝘼 𝙟𝙤𝙮𝙛𝙪𝙡 𝙣𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙡 𝙤𝙛 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙨𝙩 𝙧𝙤𝙢𝙖𝙣𝙘𝙚, 𝙣𝙚𝙬 𝙥𝙤𝙨𝙨𝙞𝙗𝙞𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙚𝙨, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙘𝙝𝙖𝙣𝙘𝙚 𝙩𝙤 𝙙𝙚𝙛𝙞𝙣𝙚 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧𝙨𝙚𝙡𝙛.

📍 Read if you like:
• Family Stories
• Coming Of Age
• Baking Puns
• Cuban Culture

I really enjoyed this book a lot more than I was anticipating. I picked it up on a whim on NetGalley and found myself super intrigued by the premise. I love when a book has diverse characters and a great representation, in this case, it’s the Cuban culture.

I also listened to the audiobook and enjoyed it! This is a Young Adult and at first, I thought it was a romance. While it does have those romantic elements, it was more of a coming-of-age story for Rubi.

I loved the talk of food and baking. There were some puns I started laughing at. This is the kind of read you’ll pick up in between those darker books. It was so uplifting and heartwarming.

I also really enjoyed the family and their connections to each other. They were each interesting and it was so fun following Rubi as she tries to live her dream. This is a young adult story - at times it did get repetitive & I went into it with a wrong impression - but the book as a whole was so fun!

Thank you so much NetGalley and the publisher for the review copy and ALC in exchange for my honest review!

•𝗧𝗪/𝗖𝗪: Racism, classism

I have to be honest: this book first hooked me because of the cover. I am so glad it did! I adored Rubi Ramos’s Recipe for Success by Jessica Parra. It is such a cute read! 

Meet Rubi Ramos. She bears a lot of pressure as a second-generation immigrant from Cuba. She is trying to find her roots through food and live up to her familys expectations.
She is also a baker who loves creating recipes. 

When she finds out about a baking contest, she is immediately drawn to it and the possibility of it helping her out of the baking ban placed on her by her parents. Will Rubi be able to partake in the contest without her parents finding out, and what will happen with that cute surfer-slash-math tutor? 

Overall this was a beautifully written book, and I cannot wait to reread a physical copy. I highly suggest adding this to your summer reads list and taking it with you for a day at the beach. Warning, a side effect of reading this book is you will want yummy baked goods almost the entire time. 

Thank you to Netgalley, St. Martin's Press, and Wednesday Books for an eARC in exchange for my honest review!

Here's the thing: I'm following GR's rating system and 3 stars is a firm "I liked it." And the truth is, I do but it also felt...a little chaotic with some of what I thought would be major plot points pushed to the side and others I thought should be shifted into a main focus.

I really feel for Rubi, I do. She's the only daughter of immigrant parents who left Cuba for America. There's very obviously some tough emotions that her parents don't share regarding why they left for Cuba and then the toxic immigrant parents who put their hopes and dreams into their children and then become disappointed when the children don't exactly do what they want. Rubi feels this immensely, and she mentions it a lot--like how she feels like she is an investment, and the weight of this investment is on her shoulders. I was a little disconcerted, too, at how often Rubi's mother is simply called "the Boss." It really disassociates and disconnects the reader but also provides insight into how Rubi feels about her mother. It's very obvious that Rubi as a closer relationship to her dad and this is seen through their shared love of baking and their collective attempt to bend the "baking ban."

The synopsis also states that Step 2 in Rubi's "Recipe for Success" is to be a successful lawyer, but to be honest, I don't even see her desire to be a lawyer throughout the book. Her full passion is thrown into baking, with some dedication to her debate team (okay, which is called Law and Debate so maybe I can cut some slack). I found her being a lawyer as a way to appease her parents. Rubi gave lots of thoughts to future baking recipes but very little to what she could accomplish as a lawyer, if it's what she really wanted.

I also found there was so much suspended disbelief in terms of the baking competition. Am I thinking about things too literally? It was a bit chaotic, and when the fourth and final challenge came along, I thought, "Really? Rubi's still allowed to do this?" I won't say what for spoiler's sake, but logically it didn't make sense. I'm not saying her concoctions weren't great because really they all sounded so mouthwatering, but I think we as readers, especially in the contemporary genre, expect large aspects of the plot to be believable.

I wasn't convinced of the romance between Ryan and Rubi either. It felt kind of forced, and I just didn't think they spent enough time together to warrant their romance. Maybe because it felt a bit like instalove to me and that isn't my jam. I wished we dove deeper into Rubi's friendship with Devon, especially leading up to Devon's confession toward the end of the book.

What a fun YA read! Loved the baking contest premise and Rubi's search to follow her dreams. Throw in some romance for an unputdownable, perfect for the beach, read,

Recommended!

Give me all the food tangential YA romances about coming into your own! Hearts everywhere.

First, the family bakery- sights, smells, sounds, descriptions makes me want to find the closest Cuban bakery because I know I couldn't do it justice. Second, the family pressure to succeed-- Rubi *must* get into Alma and be successful, her family didn't get here here for nothing, she won't spend time in the bakery when she has designs on more, but Rubi still wants to be a baker too. Third, the romance. I was squeeing from the first meet-cute with Ryan from the hysterical banter that then moves straight into flirting to their instant comfort with one another.

And while there was a stereotypical arc to the story, it's the cadence of it and expectation of it that makes it sweet, heartfelt, and focused. And the "she got in" mistake between the college and the bake-off reminded me of the Netflix-adapted To All The Boys which the majority of the book works toward resolving. In the end, the win-win-win situations were just the kind of spring into summer read. Rubi and Ryan!

DNF @ 60%. I tried. I really, really tried. I just found myself so bored with the cooking show storyline and the completely unbelievable insta-romance. Maybe it makes more sense later, but I just wasn't feeling anything while I was reading. I wanted to love this, but just couldn't get invested. I know this is a debut author and I'd be willing to try another to see if it was the story or the writing.

Rubi has been working her whole life to achieve her parents’ dream of sending her to law school, but her dreams lie in the kitchen just as much as the courtroom. After receiving disappointing news from her dream school, Rubi attempts to shield her parents and figure out how to fix things all on her own. As if one secret wasn’t enough, she is also competing in a baking competition unbeknownst to her mom, which is in complete violation of the baking ban.

Enter a gorgeous surfer who happens to excel in math, one area where Rubi struggles. As their tutoring sessions ignite sparks that she doesn’t have time for, Rubi must juggle the love of her family, the siren call of her recipe book, and a potential romance.

I so enjoyed this book! It was a very well-executed YA romance, and the slow burn romance was so sweet. I really enjoyed the scenes of them studying together, especially when Ryan compared math and baking and you could see it click for Rubi.

My favorite part of this story was the family storyline. A lot of immigrant stories tend to present parents holding onto the past and children wanting to assimilate, but this book flipped that on its head. Instead we see Rubi’s parents fully embracing their life in America (example: Rubi’s dad at one point said the Cuba of his youth doesn’t exist anymore) and Rubi longing to connect to her Cuban roots. I appreciated that Rubi’s deception was out of genuine love for her family and wanting their dreams for her to become real. This story had so much heart, and I was so pleased by the ending.

I highly recommend this one to anyone who loves YA romance! This is a perfect summer love story.

Thank you to Wednesday Books for a gifted eARC. All thoughts are my own.

Rubi Ramos is the kind of character who embodies both universal and super specific themes.

I appreciated the peek into the world of a first-generation immigrant who feels pressure to set aside something they love to become something “more” for their parents, because that is outside my lived experience. And yet, that yearning to please taps into the collective adolescent experience of feeling like you have to live a certain way to please your parents. Throughout the story, Rubi is faced with decisions that will end up shaping her life, and doesn’t that just take you back to that time? When everything and nothing seemed possible?

I loved the ways in which author Jessica Parra creates a fully-realized story with characters who leap off the page. We need more protagonists like Rubi Ramos, please and thank you.

Thanks to Wednesday Books and NetGalley for the ARC.

Rubi Ramos is a baker at heart. She loves it more than anything. But her parents, mainly her mum want her to go to university and be something better than just a baker.

Rubi enters a bake off and is trying to hide it from her parents. She is also a waiting on an acceptance letter from the university to study law. Then she gets a rejection letter... where can Ruby go from here?

This was such a cute summer read! It had everything you need delicious sounds bakes, a cute guy, family trouble and an arch nemesis. A throughly enjoyable read!!

Thanks to netgalley and Wednesday books for this arc!

“Hunched over my desk, I worked all afternoon. Each problem had a specific formula to untangle it. Exactly the way recipes did for bakes. Only for math there was no leeway for experimentation. Maybe it was a good thing because sticking to the right formula yielded one single answer.”
Rubi Ramos is a high school student, raised by Cuban immigrant parents who run a couple of successful Southern California bakeries. Rubi’s parents hope for her to attend college and become a lawyer, but Rubi loves baking so much that her mother has enacted a baking ban! When she’s waitlisted by her dream college, Rubi gets a math tutor (where sparks quickly fly!) and works to improve her resume to be offered admission. She also, without her parents' knowledge, enters a local Bake-Off competition. Filled with navigating familial expectations, coming-of-age, and plenty of baking puns, this is a book I had trouble setting down once I started it! An impressive debut, Rubi Ramos will be recommended to my students - as a high school math teacher, I especially enjoyed that the MC learns to appreciate math and see its applications beyond the classroom. My criticism is that the romance felt a bit too instantaneous to seem believable. On the other hand, I think the author did a great job balancing many different factors impacting current high school students - this felt very relatable and believable. The positive undertones left me with hope and joy after finishing.
Thanks to St Martin's Press, Wednesday Books for the ARC widget via NetGalley in exchange for my honest opinion. I switched back and forth with the audiobook, and the narrator, Karla Serrato, does an excellent job. I definitely recommend this book for my friends who read YA - and even if you don’t read YA, the MC is mature enough that you might enjoy this one!

the biggest reason i wanted to read this amazing book if for the absolutely gorgeous cover and yet i ended up falling in love with the characters more. rubi ramos is so relatable. she’s all about pursuing her dreams no matter what her parents might think about them. i really enjoyed this book and i liked how rubi’s relationship with her parents was written.

Rubi’s parents didn’t leave Cuba for her to be a baker like they are. They have much bigger plans for her - but first she needs to get accepted into Alma University. When her application is waitlisted, Rubi is determined to get in without her parents ever finding out she was waitlisted and nothing will stop her. Until she gets accepted into a local baking competition - she’s always had a passion for baking, but her parents view it as a distraction. Can she enter the competition without them finding out, and will she be able to balance getting into Alma AND the Bake Off?

I love books with baking competitions - the food descriptions always make me wish I could be there to taste test. Rubi’s creations sounded SO good! The real winner of this book was the message about family. Rubi’s relationship with her parents was definitely complicated, but as the book went on, it was clear they truly wanted everything for her. And the ending was everything I could have wanted. I wanted a bit more from the love interest though - I feel I never really got to know Ryan as much as I would have wanted to.
I love Karla Serrato’s narration of the audiobook. It was a book I could keep listening to for hours and her various accents and voices were incredible.

Thank you to St. Martin’s Press, Macmillan Audio, and NetGalley for the advance copies.

Did not finish. It just wasn't grabbing my attention. I didn't feel like I couldn connect with the characters at all.

I love a coming of age story and I love it even more when it is set around a baking competition. I related a lot to Rubi and her struggle with balance and the pressure of parents who want you to be better than they were and who don't always think about the impact that has on their kid. First generation to go to college and the pressure was a lot but I turned out alright. I loved Rubi's friends and while I don't think the romance part was really needed, it didn't take away from the rest of the story. Can't wait to see what comes next from this author. Many thanks to Wednesday Books for a gifted ecopy.

I thought this was an adorable YA Novel! I loved how much this book discussed Cuban Culture! I think Rubi was such a fun & relatable character. The little pinch of romance was perfect. I think the cooking show brought a high stakes energy to the book that I really enjoyed. Overall was a great YA & will definitely be recommending it!