King Cake Fest – Layla Rogue

2/5 stars

King Cake Fest is part of the Mardi Gras Menage series and follows Tessa as she tries to plan a Mardi Gras festival in a suburb of Chicago (though where they were seemed awfully small for a suburb up North). She meets Pierre and Justin, and they all decide almost at first sight to be in a relationship together and chase their happily ever after no matter what anyone else thinks.

In theory, this sounded like a really great first book in this series to set the scene and introduce a lot of characters that you’ll see later on. In practice, there were a lot of characters introduced in a short time that all felt really flat. I never really got to know anyone, and I kept mixing up which character was whose mother and who had what business. It was a lot to keep track of without much background information to accompany it.

The chemistry between Tessa, Pierre, and Justin felt a little off to me. I didn’t get that sense of need or desire between them; it was almost like they were just going through the motions because the book was supposed to contain a menage of some sort. I did like the three of them together, but I wanted to get more emotional depth from all of them so I could be fully committed to the relationship.

I think making this a little longer would’ve helped clear up a lot of the issues that I had. It would’ve given time to build the world around the characters a little more (I found myself suffering a little White Room Syndrome trying to figure out the setting) and more space to develop these characters more and flesh them out.

I’ll read more in this series as I’m a sucker for a menage and I’m curious to see who is featured in the remaining books, but I don’t know that it’ll be high in my TBR.