Recipe for Trouble: A grumpy/sunshine queer MM romantic comedy by Dylan MorrisonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Three and a half stars.
Ben Blumenthal is a video editor working in a fairly soul destroying job for a big corporate. He night have a lovely apartment, but his only friend is his eighty year old agoraphobic neighbour, even his cat doesn't seem to like him much, and she might only like him because he feeds her regularly. Ben's trouble is that he is cynical and people get offended at his snarkiness.
Then Vince, an acquaintance who works for a sister publication, the food magazine Gastronomic, asks Ben to edit a video for him. The powers that be want the magazine to publish video content on the website and have told one of the test chefs that he *MUST* make the videos. Vince freely acknowledges that the raw footage is absolute carnage but wants Ben to have a go and cobbling it together into something okay - the idea is to force management to rethink things and bring in professionals.
When Ben reviews the footage he can't believe it, this guy, Pete Bailey is a disaster. If he doesn't drop it he burns it, he forgets what he is saying, he says things wrong over and over. Full of indignant fury Ben edits the footage into a comedy montage with his own voice-over - along the lines of 'if this bozo can do it so could your pet hamster' and of course it is an instant hit, people love the slapstick humour and voiceovers. So management commission (aka command) a further series of videos leading up to Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Prepared to loath Pete, a good-looking guy with the job of his dreams, Ben is pleasantly surprised to discover that Pete not only enjoys Ben's humour, but off-camera he's an extremely competent chef - he seems to have an extreme version of camera shyness. As their friendship develops Ben comes to know Pete a bit better, but is there something he's not sharing?
TBH I was in two minds whether to request an ARC, I wasn't sure about the premise and I didn't love the cover art, but decided to give it a go. I'm glad I did, I rally enjoyed the developing relationship between Ben and Pete, the way in which they really 'saw' each other. What reduced the rating for me was the cause of the 'conflict', it felt unrealistic - like that would ever happen - and too mwah ha ha to be believable - yes it was clearly signalled from the beginning but that didn't make it any more realistic for me (maybe its different in the US).
Anyway, glad I took a chance on a new-to-me author and I would definitely read more.
I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley.
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