Author: Eleanor Moran
ISBN: 978-1-84744-541-4
RRP: $27.99
Breakfast in Bed is a lovely, light read blending perfect parts humour, romance, back story and tension. It is smart and captivating in a way that had me lost in its pages when I should have been doing something else.
Amber is a 31 year old chef, recently separated from her husband and trying to find her feet again. At that stage of trying to stave off the self-pity and find a new direction. A new career start to match her new life start. She is working as a sous chef in a good though unadventurous restaurant but wants to work with Oscar Retford at Ghusto, a brand new restaurant heralded for the adventurous dishes created by Oscar.
Her determination to get in the door is demonstrated by her application for a lowly job she is totally overqualified for, just to give her the chance to work with genius chef Oscar.
Oscar is passionate but he is also obnoxious, arrogant and a total pig – not to mention extremely sexy. Amber recognises all of this on their first meeting but decides to put that aside for the chance to work with the genius and the sexy is pretty much cancelled out by the arrogant obnoxiousness.
Amber, I don’t really know what I think about Amber. She is shaken up by the end of her marriage and very much in a sea of uncertainty. Blaming herself, sinking into self-pity, reminiscing at the same time as wanting to move on and being full of anger and bitterness.
The story follows Amber as she gets the job at Ghusto and subjects herself to Oscar’s fits of temper as she works her way up the food chain on her own merits before she ends up in his bed. It is also the time that she is working through her divorce from Dom, the man she fell in love with young and built life dreams around.
Her marriage to Dom ended with an affair, an echo of her childhood with a different ending. He is still in love with Amber and penitent but she’ll have none of it, there is no going back from that in her mind.
Breakfast in Bed is well written with vivid characters that jump out of the page at you. They aren’t all likeable characters and they all have striking differences but they really are vivid. It is a story of self discovery. Amber started it looking at her life, trying to discover what went wrong and how to move past it. At times it’s a little predictable but there are still some twists that got me from left field.
Amber spent a lot of time looking back on her past and we got to peek into her memories, see how she came to be who she is. She is very driven, very involved in her work and takes for granted that that is how work in the industry needs to be; not considering that she needs to look at her priorities and work out what’s important to her.
I even had a couple of revelationary teary moments so it really is a book with a little of everything. And long after I finished reading it had me thinking about the things in our lives, and the people, that we take for granted. We know they’re our friends and family, we know they love us so we don’t put in the effort we should because we get so caught up in our work and our own lives never realising quite how much we’re missing out on.
A book that hooked me and actually did give me a few laugh out loud moments with an ending I was really not expecting!
I devour books, vampires and supernatural creatures are my genre of choice but over the past couple of years, I have broadened my horizons considerably. In a nutshell – I love to write! I love interacting with a diverse range of artists to bring you interviews. Perhaps we were perfect before – I LOVE WORDS!