A review by amelianotthepilot
A Winter in New York by Josie Silver

3.0

this was eh. definitely a foreigners idealized image of nyc in the winter which was fine i guess. lots of food moments and italian american-isms.

our main character Iris, is a chef from London, her mother has recently passed away and she’s escaped a manipulative ex boyfriend and now is living in NYC trying to live the dream. She’s found work at a noodle restaurant who’s owner is her gay male best friend 🙄 (what a tired trope) and she also lives in the building. After a series of events she ends up helping our leading man, Gio, an italian american restaurant owner, figure out his family’s lost gelato recipe which Iris happens to know. 

first off it starts with a random chapter set on valentine’s day of Iris being rude to a random man (guess who this turns out to be) cause he took the last book at a bookstore. 

The book then jump cuts to September’s San Genarro festival in Little Italy and doesn’t bring up this bookshop moment until wayyyy later at which point I literally thought it wasn’t coming back.

I also feel like there was a weird confusion around her parents and the love interest’s parents that left me thinking half of the book that this might turn out to be an incest plot 🙅🏼‍♀️🙅🏼‍♀️🙅🏼‍♀️ maybe i just wasn’t paying attention enough but Iris’s mother was in a band together with two men who were a guitarist and a drummer. Her mother also dated one of the guitarist’s brother, who is the restaurant owner and Gio’s uncle that he calls papa. For me it was unclear that Iris’s mother had the baby with the drummer not the guitarist, and that the guitarist is Gio’s dad. Very confusing tbh and I spent have the book in fear it was incest

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