This is my first review ever, so I hope it's ok!
Promise is the final book the Delicious series, and was my favourite of the lot - no doubt about it. On the whole, the series is sugary-sweet romance. Sometimes, I'm happy to read a series in which every character has a traumatic backstory and scars and blah blah blah, and sometimes I just want to read a light and simple series, where every character gets their happily ever after. The Delicious series has been 6 books of low-angst, low-drama, gooey-in-the-middle (and at the start, and at the end...) stories.
The main characters, Tristan and Jared, were a bit more fleshed out and real than some of those in the previous books. I loved their dynamic, and I think the time-frame was enough for the chemistry to seem organic instead of instant. The lust was there from the get-go (even if Jared would have initially described it as "a compulsion to capture the buoyancy of [Tristan's] presence on canvas"), but it developed nicely into love. Speaking of Jared being in denial, I like that Jared didn't have a crisis, because it made sense to me that he is an artist and artists don't see gender, just beauty (or something, I don't know). This series has done gfy a few times, so it was nice that Jared just sort of... went with the flow?
Basically, I enjoyed this story.
But it wasn't prefect.
I had no problem with the writing style, or the pacing, or the characterisations. While this is not the best book I've ever read, I did want to keep reading it and finding out more. I didn't get bored; almost the opposite, really - my main problem was that there was so much I wanted to hear more about. Jared's co-workers were introduced in the first scene and then never re-appeared. We had one uncomfortable scene with Tristan's dad and then he was just mentioned in passing a few times (not to mention Tristan's mum, who had no dialogue at all). Tristan had this whole weight-loss backstory that was never really discussed outside of his head. Jared was uncomfortable with the age gap until he just...wasn't anymore. I wanted more of Tristan and Jared as a couple interacting with their friends, I wanted to see Jared make decisions (instead of just being told about him making them), I wanted to know why Tristan chose journalism (rather than it be a commonality with Brian, and that's it).
All in all, this was a good book. I read it and I liked it, but ultimately I wanted more from it.
Oh, and the series epilogue was great - the funniest part in the whole series, in my opinion. If the author wrote a whole book in that tone I would read it in a heartbeat!