Delicious by Sherry Thomas

After all the praise the author has received, I had high hopes for this one... alas...

Delicious by Sherry Thomas
(2008, Victorian) 8/20/08
Grade: 3.5

After the death of Bertie Somerset, her onetime lover, renowned cook Verity Durant isn’t sure what will happen next. She has a history with the new heir, Stuart Somerset, once illegitimate and now a rising politician, but she’s not sure if she wants him to know that she’s the same woman he loved ten years ago... or that she’s hiding a secret past of her own.

This is a hard book to grade. On one hand, it has lovely, lyrical writing, and a story that kept my attention through most of the book. On the other hand, I often felt manipulated by the author - that she was arranging the plot in ways that felt unrealistic and frustrating. (For example, the long delay before Stuart realized his cook was also his former lover - it was strung out far too long, and after a while, I just felt like the author was pulling the reader’s strings.) The sex felt titillating rather than arising from true emotion, and by the time we reached the ending, I just felt tired of all the pushing and pulling, rather than caught up in the emotions of the main characters. I found the secondary romance intriguing (although I would have liked to know more about these characters - again, the author seemed more interested in wry word games than emotion). And the food was wonderfully described, especially in the first half of the book. But overall, this was a book that just didn’t do much for me as an emotional reader - it felt more like an intellectual exercise than a romance.

I am an unabashedly emotional romance reader. I want to throw myself into a book and be carried away with the emotions of the characters. Unfortunately, I've often found that more "literary" writing and plotting put a barrier between me and this emotional experience. I've seen it with Judith Ivory, for example. It's too bad, because I do admire lovely writing - there were some beautiful passages, especially in the first half of the book where there was more of an emphasis on the food - but it's not enough. If I don't feel like I'm there with the characters, feeling what they feel, experiencing what they experience, then the book just isn't successful to me - and that seems to be hard to fit in with a more literary writing style. The only author that can do that for me is Laura Kinsale (and even she isn't always successful).