Since I panned The Friday Night Knitting Club, you might be wondering why I just read another Kate Jacobs book. Weeellll, it was a twofer (buy one, the other is free) and I needed something light after struggling through The Gold Bug Variations. The premise of Comfort Food--an aging cooking show host who is a controlling perfectionist is forced to work with a treacherous former beauty queen who will do anything to succeed--could have been the set-up for an enjoyable comic novel. Unfortunately, Kate Jacobs does not have a gift for comedy--when she tries to be funny, the scenes are simply ridiculous. Nor does she have any real talent for writing--some of the writing is truly terrible, the rest simply ineffective. Here are a couple of examples:
"The problem, she reflected one morning while washing her tawny brown hair with color-enhancing shampoo, developed somewhere between working on the show schedule for the upcoming year and learning that the CookingChannel was slashing the budget and ordering fewer episodes than usual." Do we need to know she's using color-enhancing shampoo? Because including that information makes the sentence a total mess--was the shampoo developed somewhere (note: not sometime) between the two events? No, but that's the confusing idea you might get from this horrid sentence.
"It had been a gamble when she opened, a chunk of her late husband's life insurance money dwindling in a bank account and her two young daughters." What??
At least in this book she doesn't kill off her protagonist, instead simply having her lose all her money. As in her previous novel, all the quirky characters are paired off and happy by the end of this book--but I didn't really care, as none of them seemed remotely real.
Favorite passage: None, but I do like the title.
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