finished reading

The beginning of the book is quirky fun, engaging, and intriguing.  About two-thirds through, though, I got a bit disenchanted.  I wanted to shake the main character and tell her (a la Cher in Moonstruck) to snap out of it.  I'm not sure it was supposed to be a revealing plot twist, but I saw it coming a mile away. I'm not a fan of instalove and the relationship with Mitch was rushed.  Maybe the author was trying to do too much--dealing with grief, depression, estrangement, reconciliation, a new job, job loss, building friendships, self-discovery.  I did like the letters to James Beard.

The secondary characters were more interesting than the main character.

From the publisher:

Billie Breslin has traveled far from her California home to take a job at Delicious, the most iconic food magazine in New York and, thus, the world. When the publication is summarily shut down, the colorful staff, who have become an extended family for Billie, must pick up their lives and move on. Not Billie, though. She is offered a new job: staying behind in the magazine's deserted downtown mansion offices to uphold the "Delicious Guarantee"-a public relations hotline for complaints and recipe inquiries-until further notice. What she doesn't know is that this boring, lonely job will be the portal to a life-changing discovery.

Delicious! carries the reader to the colorful world of downtown New York restaurateurs and artisanal purveyors, and from the lively food shop in Little Italy where Billie works on weekends to a hidden room in the magazine's library where she discovers the letters of Lulu Swan, a plucky twelve-year-old, who wrote to the legendary chef James Beard during World War II. Lulu's letters lead Billie to a deeper understanding of history (and the history of food), but most important, Lulu's courage in the face of loss inspires Billie to come to terms with her own issues-the panic attacks that occur every time she even thinks about cooking, the truth about the big sister she adored, and her ability to open her heart to love.

#52bookclub prompt 2: Bibliosmia: A smelly book
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