The Secret Ingredient - Sue Heath - ★★★★
AUTHOR: Sue Heath
GENRE: Romance-Drama
RATING: 4.25 stars.
In a Nutshell: A beautiful story about a group of people who bond over food. Tackles some tough themes in a soothing manner. Slow and steady in development. Likeable characters. Some teeny plot issues, but overall, enjoyable.
Plot Preview:
Twenty-nine-year-old Kate has been a widow since three years now, but she is still lost in the what-ifs of the past. To take charge of her life, she quits her job as a teacher and decides to enter the kitchen, which was Eddie’s domain when he was alive. There’s only one problem: Kate knows nothing about cooking.
Through some circumstance or the other, various neighbours, old and new, enter Kate’s life after her decision to reclaim her life. All these people are also dealing with their own issues, but somehow, everyone ends up connecting over food and the community spirit.
Will Kate be able to let go of the past? Will all her neighbours also find relief for whatever ails their spirits and bodies?
The story comes to us in the third person perspective of six characters: Kate and her neighbours.
Bookish Yays:
🍎 Six character perspectives in all, with some more minor characters mentioned, and yet their arcs never become confusing. I love how the author introduces the characters over a lag than bringing them all into the first scene and overwhelming the readers.
🍎 The characters differ from each other in age, life experiences, and attitudes. Kate is the only one in her late twenties. Jack is in his early thirties, Della is almost sixty, and Charles and Mary are possibly octogenarians. (Can’t reveal details of the sixth character as it would be a spoiler.) This age-gap connection lends a beauty and novelty to the story that would otherwise have been about typical peer friendships and relationships.
🍎 I loved the secondary characters, even more than the lead pair of Kate and Jack. While all of them were adorable, I felt most connected to Charles as he reminded me of my dad, who is struggling with similar memory issues these days. So Charles’ arc made me quite emotional. Mary (Charles’ wife) and Della (another neighbour with a passion for gardening) are beautiful humans. They tend to get a tad too personal and nosy at times, but that adds to the realism as that’s how women in small towns mostly are.
🍎 Food has a prominent role to play in this story. I was initially a bit apprehensive about this aspect because I am the kind of foodie who loves only to eat. I cook to live and not the other way around, and rarely do I experiment in the kitchen. Moreover, the cuisine in the book is typical Brit, which means I had heard of a few of the dishes and eaten hardly any of them. Regardless, I enjoyed the scrumptious-sounding delicacies and the manner in which the food brought the characters together for prep, cooking and eating.
🍎 The story creates a nostalgic kind of feel, reminiscent of the pre-SM days, when people actually visited their neighbours and spoke face to face. The bonding across the characters recreates an old-timey charm, with their shared sentiments and shared meals generating warmth in our hearts.
🍎 There are actual recipes included for all the items Kate cooks. These are not at the end of the book but integrated into the storyline – so cool!
🍎 Each of the main characters is battling a kind of loss, but their afflictions are unique to them. Thus, we see various types of heartaches in this story. After all, grief is not just the outcome of coping with a loved one's death, and the book covers various shades of grief. I loved the realism of the dilemmas faced by the characters.
🍎 Though there is so much sadness in the book, there is also an equal amount of joy and hope. Despite the intense poignancy of some scenes, the overall plot does not get too melancholic.
🍎 The author's note is the icing on the cake of this delectable read. I was delighted to see that her favourite characters were the same as mine, in the exact same order!
Bookish Mixed Bags (Two of which were still Yays for me):
🍍 The pacing of the story is quite relaxed. This might not work for those who want a fast read, but I was looking for something on the lines of “comfort food”, so I didn’t mind the lack of rush. That said, I didn’t find the book slow to read. The plot and the characters develop gradually but steadily.
🍍 While the book does NOT mention COVID, it is clear that the health issues of one of the characters because of “a virus” is a result of Long COVID. I would not have minded a reference to COVID because it is a fact of our lives now, and would have made the side effect faced by the character even more tangible. At the same time, I know that COVID is a trigger for many readers, so I get the author’s choice to stay away from mentioning it directly.
🍍 Kate and Jack as the lead pair should have been the stars of this plot. And in many ways, I liked them. But some of their decisions are so ad hoc that I couldn’t connect with them wholly, or at least as much as I did with the other characters. I didn’t understand why Kate had to quit her job to move on and try cooking. It felt extreme.
🍍 The writing gets a bit cheesy at times, especially in the romantic scenes. It's a book about food, so I suppose the cheese fits in. 😉 But some of it was too saccharine for my taste. On the plus side, it doesn’t become corny. (cheese… saccharine… corn… someone’s going overboard with the food metaphors! 👀)
🍍 The story is quite predictable. Of course, this goes with the genre; no one picks up women’s fiction expecting thrills and twists. But I wish it had not stuck to the tried-and-tested so firmly. There were many avenues where it could have broken the chain, especially in Della’s arc. I still enjoyed it on the whole, but taking Della’s story through a different path would have made the book shine even more in my eyes.
Bookish Nays:
🍊 Kate's journey of going from a zero-level cook to a MasterChef almost immediately was too farfetched for my liking. (Ignore the green-eyed monster!) Hardly any baking mishaps? Perfection in almost every attempted dish? How, how, how?
🍊 The proceedings are a bit too smooth, if you get what I mean. Hardly any conflict (whether with people or with cooking) happens on page. Most of the relationships are instantaneous, and most of the discussions are amicable. This Indian wanted more spice in this dish! (Not of the romantic kind though – that was at the perfect level!)
All in all, despite the trivial issues, I still enjoyed this read. It helped that it came in my life at the right time, when I needed something simultaneously relaxing and emotional. I usually avoid books with the dead-partner trope as they feel very similar to ‘PS I Love You.’ But this one has a fresh feel to it, thanks to all the delicious food and yummy characters.
I had initially assumed this to be a debut work, but as it turns out, the author has published several 'hot' romances, under the pseudonym ‘Zara Stoneley’. I am not one for steamy novels, but I will definitely look forward to what more ‘Sue Heath’ has to offer.
The parting note calls this ‘effervescent fiction’, and I like that so much better than ‘women’s fiction’. We need to rename this genre! Even ‘feel-good fiction’ is a good substitute to that bland-sounding 'women's fiction'.
So…
Much recommended to all readers of ‘effervescent/feel-good fiction’ who want to read emotional and sweet flavours balanced with some sad undertones.
My thanks to Rachel's Random Resources, HarperCollins UK, One More Chapter, and NetGalley for a complimentary copy of 'The Secret Ingredient', and for allowing me to be a part of this blog tour. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.
Content warnings: death, marital breakup (no infidelity), COVID (though not mentioned openly.)
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Blurb:
She’s writing her story one recipe at a time...
‘A delicious story that wraps itself around your heart’ Evie Woods, bestselling author of The Lost Bookshop.
It’s been three years, two weeks and one day since Kate Shaw’s life changed forever. Three years, two weeks and one day that Kate has been angry – with herself and life.
But today is different. Different because Kate has finally taken the step she’s been avoiding…back into the kitchen. Now, what begins as a (disastrous) attempt to make pancakes becomes a culinary journey that is not only a love letter to someone so important to her, but also an unexpected means of connection to a community she never knew she had…
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Author Sue Heath:
Sue Heath lives in Cheshire, England. When she isn’t working, she can often be found running around agility courses with her spaniel, and in the evenings, she loves to cook and spend time with family and friends.
‘The Secret Ingredient’ is an uplifting story that explores how a sense of community, sharing, friendship, love, and a feeling of belonging can help us make sense of life, find comfort, and heal. How we can find our happiness in ordinary things.
Sue has also written fourteen USA Today bestselling romcoms under the pseudonym Zara Stoneley and has sold over half a million copies of her stories worldwide.
Connect with her on:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ZaraStoneley
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zarastoneley/
Website: http://www.sueheath.com
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Check out this book:
Buy Links:
Publishers Site: https://harpercollins.co.uk/products/the-secret-ingredient-sue-heath?variant=40275147096142
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This has been a stop on the #TheSecretIngredient blog tour conducted by Rachel's Random Resources. (@rararesources) Thanks for stopping by!
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