Delicious

Title: Delicious
Author: Ruth Reichl, narrated by Julia Whelan
Published: May 6, 21014 by Random House Audio
Pages: 12 hours 58 min
Source: Library Overdrive
Rating: 4/5
Goodreads

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.

My review:

Take a combination of New York City, an Italian deli, mouth watering descriptions of food, a series of mysterious clues leading to letters from WWII, and a colorful cast of characters, and what's not to love about this book? It was in a word.....well.......delicious! So many great characters to love, even down to the secondary ones like the husband and wife team who own the shop where Billie works on weekends, and of course Sam (the best friend and super sleuth). The store customer labeled "Mr. Complainer", fun to see how that plays out. The interwoven theme with the letters from fictionalized Lulu to the great chef James Beard added a nice parallel plot, and a bit of history. The food descriptions were superb, I wouldn't recommend reading this if you are hungry 🙂 The parts about Billie and her sister were not all that engaging to me, but while they have an effect on Billie's life, they don't take up a great deal of the story.

The narration on this was well done, especially the voices of the Italian shop owners and Sam.

A good book for someone who is not a "foodie", a great book for those who are.