Georgia's Kitchen

Book Details:
Genre: Chicklit/women's fiction
Page Count: 336
Publication Date: August 3, 2010
Why I read it: received review copy
Grade: B+

Cover thoughts:
Too much red. I would so much rather the red shading be over just the silverware so we could see the beautiful scenery in the background.

About the author:
Jenny Nelson is a former web editor for sites like ivillage, vogue.com, and style.com. Georgia's Kitchen is her first novel.

The plot:
Georgia is the head chef at one of the top restaurants in Manhattan, but a bad review gets her fired. Then her fiance breaks up with her, so needless to say, things aren't going very well for her. So she heads to Italy to work for her former mentor who is opening up another restaurant. She loves it there, but when she is offered a wonderful restaurant job in Italy, she realizes her heart is longing for something more. The plot moves at a great pace until the end, where I feel like it just started to lose steam and drag a bit, which was sad because I otherwise adored the book.

Characters:
Georgia is a wonderful character. She is understandably a bit whiny and down, but I really liked her. She's someone I would be friends with in real life. There are a lot of secondary characters, and for the most part, they're great and likable, but this story mostly focuses on Georgia.

Setting:
We start off in New York, but it's when the story moves to Italy that it gets really enjoyable. The author paints a lively picture of the Italian countryside, and I would LOVE to go there. There's something about these stories where women head off to Europe that I just love. Maybe it's that I can't do it myself, and so have to live vicariously through them.

Notable quotes:
"I'm not telling you this to burden you, but so you can see that you're not the only one with--how do you Americans call it? Issues. You lost your job, your fiance, but here you have another chance. Stop looking for what you don't have, and start seeing what you do."

Read this if you're in the mood for: a story that includes Italy and food. I'll tell you, I don't like to cook at all, but for some reason I like reading about people who cook, especially in this type of story.

Continue or part ways? I will definitely read more by this author. Her writing style is easy to read and very entertaining.