In Recipe for Persuasion, Ashna Raje is slowly losing her late father's restaurant. Calling her relationship with her mother "strained" would be laughably underestimating their emotionally fraught battles. A few years earlier, a therapist "diagnosed her with PTSD resulting in acute clinical depression and anxiety" (p. 92), and Ashna battles her way through a lot of resulting issues throughout this story.
Ashna is convinced she can untangle the mess her life has become herself... until the last person in the world she ever wants to see again steps back into her life. She and Rico Silva, world-famous soccer star, were high school sweethearts, and when they end up paired together on a reality cooking show, everything in Ashna's life unravels faster than she can imagine.
The thing with unraveling a mess is that you can create something new and orderly out of it, once you finish the painful process of untying all the knots. Which Ashna eventually can appreciate, but it takes her a long time.
This book was a lot of fun, since I love to cook, but it also kind of left me wrung out for a day or so. Just so you know. I liked it better than Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors, mostly because I liked Ashna much better than the heroine of that one. But neither of them are books I'd re-read.
Particularly Good Bits:
The downside of choosing cowardice was that there was only so long you could hide. Problems were patient. They always waited you out (p. 22).
"Being who you're not takes too much energy" (p. 270).
In every part of her life, that was all she ever wanted to be, forcefully the same on the inside and the outside. Able to say what she wanted to say, able to do what she wanted to do, able to think of herself as she wanted to be thought of (p. 387).
If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: R. Very R. Discussion of marital rape, lots of suggestive dialog, a love scene that is pretty graphic until it fades to black, lots of thinking about sexual topics, and quite a bit of bad language. I skimmed several parts that went beyond my comfort level.
I read the first book, and it was good, but definitely R rated, which I didn't appreciate. It sounds like this one would appeal to me more, but I am still not sure I will bother picking it up.
ReplyDeleteRoxann, yeah, I am not inspired to read more by this author, as she's definitely spicier than I enjoy. But I didn't feel like these two were a total waste of time either, as it was really interesting learning about their Indian-American culture, at least.
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