Review: The Recipe for Happiness

The Recipe for Happiness by Jane Lovering
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Seren is a live-in housekeeper and cook at an older person's drop-in centre in a small Yorkshire village. Her brother Andrew and his husband Greg are constantly trying to get Seren to come out of her shell and meet people (men) but she's comfortable with staying close to home, using her culinary skills to cook for the rambunctious guests, even if their palates reject anything remotely different (like adding cheese to mashed potato). The trouble is, Seren never goes anywhere other than shopping in the local shops and visiting Andrew once a week. Truth be told she's scared of getting lost.

Then one day a new employee joins the drop-in centre. Ned is a general handyman, but his eyes suggest a bigger story. Seren worries he could be homeless, or at least living in his car, or maybe he's just been released from prison. Initially prickly towards each other, these two lost souls develop a tentative friendship. But it takes Seren's accidental adoption of an abandoned dog for her to start expanding her horizons.

OMG the angst! Ned had angst, Seren had angst, arguably Andrew had angst. I do get that maybe it takes two broken souls to coax each other into a better life but really did there have to be this much angst?

I genuinely had no idea where this was going. At one point I suspected that Ned was actually the dog in disguise (or vice versa)!

Anyway, I liked it but I didn't love it. I could have done without the recipes and I felt it ended a bit abruptly.

Read on my Kindle Unlimited subscription.

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