Comfort Food

By Kate Jacobs
Published by the Penguin Group
Berkley Trade Paperback Edition /April 2009

Cooking show host Gus Simpson has two daughters, two cats, a best friend, and a nineteen-room manor house. Sounds dull. What if I said fifty-year-old cooking show host Gus Simpson is on the verge of losing her long-running TV series unless she teams up with Spanish hottie (former beauty queen and aspiring TV host) Carmen Vega? What if those two daughters are still dealing with unexplored feelings from their father's death more than ten years earlier? What if Gus' next-door neighbour and BFF spent her days hiding from her past? Sounds way more intriguing, doesn't it?

Jacobs builds a lovely story about family, friends, love, and career, all centered around a cooking channel show, with a behind-the-scenes insight into how these shows are filmed, and how food - as always - brings everyone together.

It's not a complicated story, but I read it swiftly and missed it when I wasn't reading it. This novel was exactly what it said it was - Comfort Food.