Some Like It Hot
I’m wondering if Louisa Edwards wishes she’d chosen a different heroine for her latest series. Somehow right now doesn’t seem like the best time to have a super rich, super bitch heroine and Eva Jansen in Some Like It Hot is both. I couldn’t stand her and I sure as hell couldn’t figure out what a nice guy like Danny Lunden, the hottie pastry chef hero, would see in her. She’s like Veronica (from the Archie comics) with a Sex in the City wardrobe and an affinity for casual sex.
Readers of Ms. Edwards’ series will recall Eva, Danny, and the Rising Star Chef competition from the first (and better) book in the series, Too Hot to Touch. You don’t need to have read that book to make sense of this one, however. As the book begins, Danny and the crew from Lunden’s, a famous steak house in the Village, are boarding a plane for the Windy City where they will compete in the second round of the contest. The plane, however, waits on the runway for one missing passenger to arrive. As Danny asks the flight attendant what the hold-up is — like me, he can’t believe the plane would delay take-off for one person – Eva dashes down the runway, thirty minutes late, saying, “God, Daddy’s getting on the airline’s Board of Directors is the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Danny’s brain knows she’s a stone cold brat — he refuses to partake in the mimosas to which she treats the whole plane because he’s not about to let her “buy him off” — but his below-the-belt body doesn’t care. So when the two meet again in the swanky hotel in which they are staying — guess who has the penthouse? — he’s all yes, baby, yes when she traps him in the elevator, pushes the emergency stop button, presses her Michael Kors clad body up against him, and seductively asks if “she can make it up to” him. You see, Eva gets what she wants and Eva wants Danny Lunden in her bed — in her experience, pastry chefs make superb lovers with their ability to meticulously focus.
Nothing about their romance — and really, it’s just sex for most of the book — appealed to me. In Some Like It Hot, the trope of opposites attract doesn’t work. Eva is unethical, Danny is not; Eva thinks only of herself, Danny is there for his friends and family; Eva bristles with snarky bravado, Danny wins over people with his humor and self-deprecating charm. I didn’t believe in Eva’s capacity for love or in her hasty redemption at the novel’s end. Danny, and the reader, warranted better. If you can ignore the loser leads, the rest of the characters in the book are great. Ms. Edwards does an exceptional job of showcasing her chefs, their world, and their creations. Everyone but Eva and her megalomaniac father — Theo Jansen, arrogant billionaire and paltry parent — are well rounded and compelling. I find the affair playing out between two of the judges irresistible: Claire Durand, the forty something French Editor-in-Chief of Delicieux magazine, and Kane Slater, the twenty-seven year old rock superstar and famous foodie. The relationship between the two is so delightfully rendered; it alone is worth reading the book for.
Ms. Edwards is a clever writer; her characters speak the way real people do and she can be very funny. She writes great sex scenes and always conveys a strong sense of place. In her other books, her prose has been both lively and fluid. This book, however, has a choppy feel to it. Scenes sometimes lurch from one to another; issues are raised and then left unsettled. Several relational conflicts in the book — Danny’s with his brother Max, Eva’s with her father, Winslow’s (a chef on Danny’s team) with Drew (Eva’s assistant) — are resolved in an awkward rush. One relationship, that of Beck (one of Danny’s crew) and Skye, a female chef from the West Coast team, is given so much emphasis it’s a distraction. (It won’t surprise anyone reading this story that Ms. Edwards’s next book will be about that pair.)
Should you read this book? Well, I have enjoyed Ms. Edwards’s earlier books and, despite all that’s wrong with this book, I enjoyed this one as well. I’d say this book is a strong B book brought down to a C by an unlikable heroine. I love strong female heroines. But, in Some Like It Hot, Diva Eva needs a little more Betty and a lot less Veronica for me to care whether or not she gets the guy.