A solid debut; this book made me very hungry, and it is clear the author knows their stuff when it comes to food and restaurants. I'm not sure that really translated into a romantic comedy novel. So many of the characters were unlikeable, it felt difficult to root for any of them.
The book did avoid a lot of the usual tropes, and there were interesting plot points involving family ties, but the author didn't go deep enough to make them feel of value. Lots of the relationships had quick easy resolutions that unfortunately didn't feel believable. Overall this love letter to cookbooks and their writers gets a 3 out of 5 from me.

This is a quick witted, funny book in the tradition of writers like Nora Ephron. I liked the premise of the difficult star and ghost writer working on a cookbook. There's a great cast of amusing characters and the New York setting came alive.. Sometimes the scenes didn't quite land for me but the writing was evocative and vivid.
I'm the opposite of a foodie and am the pickles eater ever, so I'm a tough crowd as I was constantly overcoming my disgust at the food descriptions but for a food lover, I imagine this could be a diet breaker.
Promising debut

The experience of reading this book was incredibly enjoyable, filled with both heart and humor., immersing myself in the narrative. Moreover, the story had a delightful way of stirring up my appetite, adding yet another layer to my overall enjoyment.

2.5/5 stars. I finished it, but I'm irritated about it. I feel my thoughts are best summed up in this sentence: "This book is a debut. It shows."

'Food Person' is a piece of contemporary fiction (I couldn't even begin to put a genre on it) about a food writer called Isabella who gets hired to ghostwrite a cookbook for a vapid celebrity called Molly Babcock who wants to turn her trashed career around. Isabella is a devotee of the cult of food and therefore, has strong morals and standards about how a cookbook should be written. Molly hasn't eaten carbs in years. I think you can see how things will progress from here.

I kept waiting for something interesting to happen. Packaged with a different cover, this could easily have been a contemporary romance between a ghostwriter and a hot chef who work on this cookbook for an annoying celebrity. I kept waiting for something new to be offered - an idea, a concept, a plot - and it never came. I don't think the book is particularly well written from a structural standpoint. We go round and round in circles with these characters, never quite progressing either way. There's one moment that's really strong and interesting - and we get the most saccharine response from it ever devised.

Isabella is awful as a protaganist. Her 'I can't write this cookbook because I want to be a proper food writer' schtick got real tired, real fast. And she is, ultimately, an incredibly passive character. Things happen to her, she doesn't drive the plot she just reacts to it. Someone else's mistake gets her a contact, someone's else's tragedy sets her free, someone tells her (Multiple people tell her actually) to loosen her morals and just get on with the crappy job which she was always going to do anyway. Is it any wonder I spent half the book silently yelling to myself 'GROW A SPINE WOMAN' to a character who just comes off as naïve, stupid and, ultimately, just a shitty person.

All the characters in this book suck. They're just awful people. Gabe is the one exception and he has about 5 minutes of page time. Suck doesn't necessarily mean they're badly written - I think Jeannie is the exception here - but the others are clunkily handled, particularly Mollie and Fiona. There's a conflict between Fiona and Isabella that's very underdeveloped - so much so that I didn't work out WHY the conflict was there until one of the characters spelled it out on the page. Isabella was the worst for me, I imagine because we spent the most time with her and therefore, her lack of development or growth as a character in any capacity was the most obvious. She's an unpleasant person, both unable to stick up for herself while simultaneously carrying around this air of superiority to other people that she uses to justify shitty actions. There's this whole plotline about a binder of recipes Molly's mother had and it takes Isabella until THE END OF THE BOOK to work out that those recipes could be incredibly triggering for Molly and her abusive childhood. THE END OF THE BOOK. I cannot believe for a second this girl grew up in New York City.

The ending is rushed. There is a natural ending point where everything falls apart, but the book just continues on to deliver a weird happy ending that feels much less satisfying than the big moment did. The author felt the need to tie everything up in a bow and make the main characters happy and friends and ??? You had a great ending already, you didn't need the last fifty pages.

The foodie aspects are good and god, justice for Gabe, because he's the one good person in 300+ pages, but otherwise, skip this one. It's nothing you haven't seen before.

I really enjoyed this book. Pretty much every character was so unlikeable which is always my favourite type of character. The protagonist is so selfish and so rude to everyone around her, there’s a point where she tells her mother that she’s not self centred and I was honestly on the verge of shouting out loud. She throws everyone under the bus and nothing is ever her fault in her eyes. I love a flawed protagonist so this worked for me but if you don’t I’d maybe give this one a miss. I liked all the food talk and I find the concept of ghostwriters so interesting so it was a fun look behind the curtain of that! It was a nice easy read.

Highly entertaining novel. Pace started off a little bit slow but I enjoyed the writing style enough to persevere and overall found the book very enjoyable

Thank you to NetGalley and the Publisher for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

A novel set in NYC about characters whose lives are enriched or risked by food.
Isabella is a young woman who loses her job.
Molly is an actress.
Soon, their paths cross when Isabella becomes a ghost writer for Molly’s upcoming cookbook.
I enjoyed the food scene, the themes around food, and the dynamics between the talented person and the entitled incompetent or weird rich person.
The writing was not fully to my taste, but I am glad this book exists.
It was fun.

This was such a wonderful read, full of heart and humour!
I really enjoyed both main characters in their own ways and I savoured each page for as long as I could.
Needless to say, it also made me very hungry!
Highly highly recommend, this would make the perfect summer read.

Ideal for foodies, this take on female friendship in the age of TikTok and Instagram is sure to leave many feeling deliciously satisfied. Introverted cook Isabella loses her job at Comestibles after messing up a cooking video, and stumbles into a ghostwriting job for mercurial actress Molly Babcock. This also forces her to re-examine her relationship with her flatmate Owen, the son of the media mogul who got her the ghostwriting deal.

While falling in love with sous-chef Gabe and trying to re-interest the wild actress in the recipes that Molly's mother lovingly curated before her death, Isabella also has to rewrite the script of her relationship with her own mother, whose hoarding and compulsive cooking is out of control. Well-paced with some terrific set-pieces, this is one of those 'would be a great Netflix series,' books that nonetheless stands up on its own, and it's always refreshing to see a male writer give us a non-cringey take on female characters. Some great jokes too!