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A review by bookstolivewith
Delicious! by Ruth Reichl
3.0
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Ruth Reichl’s Delicious! was the perfect book to get me out of a slight book slump and to finish out January. It’s all about food and food publishing, so if you’re like me and love the Bon Appetite Test Kitchen or Ratatouille or Julie & Julia, you’ll probably enjoy it! It’s got mouth-watering descriptions of food and it’s got a fun extra historical fiction element as well, although it’s set in the 2000s. If you’ve never heard of Delicious!, the barebones plot is that our protagonist Billie is new to NYC and just landed her dream job at Delicious! magazine. But her personal life is a mess and life at the magazine is about to get complicated, so what’s a girl to do next? Hide away in a hidden library with some coded letters? Sounds about right!
That being said, it’s not the strongest writing ever and the plot does have some repetitive moments. There’s also a lot of moments where you have to suspend your disbelief, which is fine and often required of readers but you do have to commit on this particular moment (if you’ve read this one, guess what moment I’m thinking of). However, it doesn’t stop me from wanting to read Reichl’s other nonfiction works, especially since they are about food.
My other issue was (spoiler alert!) Billie’s relationship with Mitch — considering she’d quit college to take the magazine job, we can assume she’s about 22, maybe 23, but Mitch seems to be old enough to be a part-time college professor or at least a fairly successful architect and a full adult human. It made me a bit concerned about their age difference which wasn’t really addressed in the book itself. Luckily, the book primarily focuses on Billie’s life, so my concerns about Mitch weren’t enough to deter me from enjoying the book as a whole.
Ruth Reichl’s Delicious! was the perfect book to get me out of a slight book slump and to finish out January. It’s all about food and food publishing, so if you’re like me and love the Bon Appetite Test Kitchen or Ratatouille or Julie & Julia, you’ll probably enjoy it! It’s got mouth-watering descriptions of food and it’s got a fun extra historical fiction element as well, although it’s set in the 2000s. If you’ve never heard of Delicious!, the barebones plot is that our protagonist Billie is new to NYC and just landed her dream job at Delicious! magazine. But her personal life is a mess and life at the magazine is about to get complicated, so what’s a girl to do next? Hide away in a hidden library with some coded letters? Sounds about right!
That being said, it’s not the strongest writing ever and the plot does have some repetitive moments. There’s also a lot of moments where you have to suspend your disbelief, which is fine and often required of readers but you do have to commit on this particular moment (if you’ve read this one, guess what moment I’m thinking of). However, it doesn’t stop me from wanting to read Reichl’s other nonfiction works, especially since they are about food.
My other issue was (spoiler alert!) Billie’s relationship with Mitch — considering she’d quit college to take the magazine job, we can assume she’s about 22, maybe 23, but Mitch seems to be old enough to be a part-time college professor or at least a fairly successful architect and a full adult human. It made me a bit concerned about their age difference which wasn’t really addressed in the book itself. Luckily, the book primarily focuses on Billie’s life, so my concerns about Mitch weren’t enough to deter me from enjoying the book as a whole.