Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake (Winner Bakes All, #1)

by Alexis Hall

In Rosaline’s experience this was what victory over institutional prejudice looked like: nobody actually apologising or admitting they’d done anything wrong, but the institution in question generously offering to pretend that nothing had happened. So—win?

That did not bode well. Bodewise, things were honestly looking pretty rough.

we’ve progressed from innuendo to outuendo.

The worst of it was, she’d done this to herself. She’d had every conceivable advantage. Excellent schools. Affluent parents. Good teeth and twenty-twenty vision. But none of it had quite compensated for her ability to make genuinely atrocious decisions.

Her sense of reality was still on the wibble.

Oh God. Oh help. He was doing kindness at her. Rosaline couldn’t cope with people doing kindness at her. It made her feel like she’d shoplifted a lipstick. Except the lipstick was made of time and emotional energy.

“Taking an interest is when you ask somebody how their runner beans are doing. When you persistently ask someone to explain why their life experiences don’t exactly match yours, that’s an interrogation.”

They eyed each other across the bracken.

There was a silence. It wasn’t comfortable. But it wasn’t wipe-your-eyes-with-chili-on-your-fingers awful either.

Wilfred Honey was still twinkling at her. As far as Rosaline could tell, he’d been twinkling solidly for the best part of a century.

There’s nothing wrong with being fuckbuddies, and there’s nothing wrong with holding out for the love of your life, but you need to be clear about which one you’re offering and which one you’re looking for.” Rosaline sighed. “It doesn’t really work that way in straight people land. At least, not very often.” “That seems like a significant flaw in the system.”

But it had always been a broken tooth of a thought, the kind you didn’t poke at too much in case it revealed something you didn’t like.

That was sex for you—it only got really good when you didn’t care how undignified the whole business was. When you got sweaty and urgent, and you forgot to worry that your face was doing funny things, and your legs were all over the place, and you were showing someone bits of yourself that you couldn’t quite guarantee the attractiveness of.

“But if nobody will give anybody the things they need, then nobody will ever have the things they need, and we’ll have to play the game forever.” “And that, my darling”—Lauren grinned—“is capitalism.” “I don’t like capitalism. Capitalism is stupid.”

Monopoly as intended

He was so blatantly the sort of man you were supposed to fancy that Rosaline felt deeply uncomfortable about fancying him.

In Rosaline’s experience, people who told her to stand up for herself meant “to everybody except me.” So it was an idea she approached warily at best.

“Oh, you know. We teach boys to talk about what they want and girls to talk about their feelings. And then you grow up and you realise you’ve got to do both, and it’s all a bit of a shock.”

Okay, Rosaline. Embarrassingly obvious note to self: working-class people can be queer too. “Wow. Sorry. Actually sorry. That was tragically heteronormative of me.” “Yeah. Turns out bisexuals ain’t like quinoa. You get ’em round my way too.”

“Of course there’s more. But so what? No one can have everything. You’ve just got to figure out what matters. And then not let stuff what don’t matter get in the way of stuff what does.”

It all seemed so simple, so attainable, so…right in front of her when he said it. But she knew the moment she got out of the van she’d be swept straight back into an ocean of coulds and shoulds and other people’s expectations.

This had started weird and was showing no signs of de-weirding.

“It feels so unbearably middle-class. You know, Woe is me, my life is fine, but I’m sad because Daddy didn’t buy me a pony.” “I mean, I don’t think you’re sad. And it’s not that your dad didn’t buy you a pony, it’s that him and your mum was pricks your whole life.”

Or maybe even wasn’t the point at all and you didn’t have to keep a constant record of who owed what to whom. Because most people, at least most people you wanted in your life, wouldn’t be out to use it against you anyway. It was a strange thought, but a comforting one.

Horlicks was not a beverage designed for toasting. It also wasn’t as calming as the adverts made it sound. In fact, Rosaline was starting to think Amelie might have been onto something when she’d said it tasted like sand and old people.

She was just…jumbly, as if her whole life was a jigsaw puzzle that had been put away in the wrong box, so she’d been trying to make a picture of a sunset with pieces that were meant to be a cow.

There was power in it, she was starting to realise. Living in a world where you got to choose what mattered. And with time, and work, and perhaps a tiny bit of therapy, maybe she could have that too.

“You know the two poshest things in the world?” “Um, the Queen and Victoria Beckham?” “Saying you ain’t posh,” he told her. “And saying the words ‘very successful in their fields.’

I’ve spent my entire life with the spectre of your expectations following me around like Banquo’s ghost

And once more, Amelie lapsed into a thinky silence. Which was good, wasn’t it? It was good to have a daughter who thought for herself. Fucking terrifying, but good.

“Why not? I’m great. I’m obstreperous.” “That’s not a good thing,” Rosaline told her. Amelie did a stubborn pointy thing with her chin that Rosaline hoped she hadn’t picked up from her. “It means noisy and difficult to control. And I don’t want to be easy to control because people being easy to control is how Hitler happened.”

you’re standing before us today like a display of artisanal grissini, tall and proud and faintly knobbly.

I’ve always been a big proponent of the Death of the Author—and I feel it’s really important for readers to have as much space as possible to decide what’s important to them about what they’ve read and to draw their own conclusions.