C. Fonseca

I was given this ARC by the publisher in exchange for an Honest Review.

This was a fun and engrossing book.

It was about Lili and Jess (with a side of Lili's daughter Ru). Jess is a bicycle rider professionally who has a gnarly accident at the end of a race and so is recovering when her brother Ben dies. He lived in Australia and so Jess finds that she has to go there to settle his estate.

One part of that is a Restaurant that he started with Lili who is a Chef. Oh, and the two of them were friends, and... he's Ru's father.

Needless to say the two women don't get on very well at the beginning. But, Ru takes to Jess almost immediately (at least, that's how it seemed to me), and that's a really cool through line in the novel.

The two women do start to get closer and closer though, and while there weren't a ton of surprises in the twists and turns I enjoyed reading how these two seemingly different people fit together.

As I may have implied, I really liked the character of Ru, Lili's daughter. Very uniquely drawn. At times she was really intuitive which worked for pushing the story forward, and at other times she was just plain hilarious as a kid.

The rest of the secondary characters were interesting too (would have loved to see more Jonathan and his family though). Another of my favorite secondary characters was Alex, Lil's Sous-Chef and her parents were pretty cool too.

It was a really fun novel (oof, that crash made my knees hurt though).… (meer)