Monday 6 July 2015

The Dish by Stella Newman


Thanks to Frances Gough and Headline Books I received a copy of this in exchange for an honest review......

Love is on the menu. With a side order of lies.

Meet Laura Parker, a restaurant critic for The Dish is finding her feet again after getting divorced and is finding the dating scene not very successful and after been dumped yet again by another looser, Laura decides to seek comfort in a bacon sandwhich in a local cafe but when the last sandwich has been sold to another customer sat behind her, Laura instead orders one of their renowned custard doughnuts, only to find again that Adam, the customer sitting behind her, has been served the last one.  But when she takes a closer look she sees a talented, handsome man who outshines the string of jokers she's been dating.

 A friendship forms, but Adam has a secret that he doesn't yet want to share with Laura, and Laura feels she can't tell Adam what she does for a living.  Can a relationship survive their secrets?  Tricky for someone who prides herself on honesty.  And how can you expect your boyfriend to be honest if you're not quite telling the truth yourself?

To be honest I'm not sure how I feel about this one.  I neither loved it nor hated it, it was good and all the talk/descriptions of all the yummy dishes and of course the mention of doughnuts which made me crave them, I actually thought that I'd have to go to the shop to get a bag of doughnuts but I abstained from that idea.  It took a while for me to get into this book and from one page to the next I was never sure if I was going to keep turning pages or put it down but I continued.  It was very easy to put down and go do something else for a while, that's why it took me so long to finish this, unfortunately that's not what I'm looking for in a book. I want a story I can't bear to put down, I want to lose track of time while in the story and have it finished in a few hours, I didn't get that with this one.  It's a nice story but easily forgettable.

Alot of the chapters made up of emails between Laura, her family members, work colleagues but I skimmed through most of these as they were one of the things that put me off, I felt they were too frequent and sometimes made up majority of a chapter.  I do like a bit of humour in my Chick lit stories (who doesn't?) but in most parts it just felt forced in parts in this one.  It's a good story in there, it's just not what I hoped for.

This is Stella Newman's third book, having written Pear Shaped and Left Overs which I've never read but will definitely read them at some stage but I'm looking forward to see what Stella Newman will serve up next.

The Dish is available on Kindle and in all good bookstores.

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