Baked Alaska

Baked Alaska

By: Josi S. Kilpack

I don’t know about you, but I definitely want to try some Baked Alaska.  It looks absolutely divine.  All that chocolate and strawberry baked into one desert.  Yum.  And who knew you could actually bake ice cream?  That fact was as foreign to me as Shawn’s aloofness to his mother during their Alaskan cruise.  The once loveable Shawn is now keeping secrets from Sadie. Pete and Breanna even know what’s up.  Why are they keeping Sadie out of the loop?

Summary

Secrets are always at the heart of a mystery, and that is the last thing Sadie wants to solve while on an Alaskan cruise with her children and boyfriend.  Unfortunately secrets have a ticket to board the cruise as well.  They start the moment Sadie finds Shawn talking to a mysterious woman whom he refuses to talk about.  Soon the secret leaks out to Breanna and Pete, leaving Sadie in the dark.  When Mysterious Woman is found unconscious and a man dies in the buffet line, Sadie starts her own investigation, convinced she’ll get to the bottom of Sean’s secret if she finds out what happened to these people.

Sadie’s Family at the Center

This book wasn’t so much about the mystery as it was about Sadie’s family relationships.  She comes to realize that though her relationship with her children is good, that relationship changes as her children grow older.  She won’t always be the one who they go to when they scrape their knee, get pushed over on the playground, or are trying to find themselves.  Sadie has to learn that as she travels through the beautiful Alaskan country. 

Relationships Explored

Breanna is trying to plan her wedding, but her soon-to-be mother in law keeps getting in the way.  She wants Breanna wedding to be everything Breanna doesn’t want.  Liam, Breanna’s fiancé, is caught in the middle of it.  Breanna and Liam’s relationship are tested in Baked Alaska.  Can Breanna really handle being the wife of a well-to-do English gentleman?  Though this isn’t the main relationship readers follow in the book, it nevertheless delves into Breanna’s character more than in previous books where Breanna is hardly present. 

Sadie and Sean’s relationship is at the core of Baked Alaska.  Perhaps the real mystery isn’t what made Mysterious Woman pass out, or what happened to the man who collapsed in the buffet line, but how Sean and Sadie can keep their mother-son relationship without Sadie treading too much on Sean’s life.  The mystery is the background story for the relationships blossoming in this book, including Pete and Sadie’s.  But I’ll stop there.  I don’t want to give anything away. 

Personal Review

I enjoyed this book for the family element contained within.  I feel the family relationships were explored in more depth in Baked Alaska than in any previous book in the Sadie Hoffmiller series, which makes this book stand out among other books in the series.  I would highly recommend reading this series if only to get to Baked Alaska.  It may have you questioning where you fit in with your family and how your relationships have changed with family members.