A Second Bite at the Apple

October 20, 2014
Sydney Strauss, heroine of Bate’s (The Girls’ Guide to Love and Supper Clubs) second novel, is in a years-long funk over losing the first great love of her life, and to make matters worse, she is downsized from her job as news producer for a popular morning TV show. The bad news: she’s broke. The good news: she is free to pursue her dream of becoming a food writer. As she struggles to make a living working part-time at a farmer’s market, she finds herself drawn to a potential boyfriend with a shady past, while at the same time dealing with her demanding sister’s upcoming wedding. When her big journalistic break finally comes, she faces a moral quandary that forces her to decide if the career she always wanted warrants a personal betrayal. Sydney has a breezy, idiomatic voice that seems pitched more to young adult readers. And the reader can sense bits of plot clicking neatly into place as the story heads for a predictable resolution.

December 1, 2014

Sydney Strauss, a 26-year-old frustrated food writer, has been laid off from a job producing segments on a morning news show that was just meant to pay the bills until her dream job came along. Her career is in crumbles, so with nary a nibble she takes a position with misogynistic Rick at his farmers market stand in Washington, DC. Sydney's love life has been marinating for four years ever since her breakup with high school boyfriend Zach (he cheated on her). After she insults and yells at PR guy Jeremy, he returns for second helpings. After their first date, Sydney does an Internet search on Jeremy and finds out that he had been caught in a pay-for-review scandal a few years back. Appalled, she tries to distance herself but finds him persistent and increasingly on her mind. In addition, her father is about to lose his car dealership, and her engaged sister, kept in the dark regarding her parents' looming financial problems, is making expensive wedding demands. At the moment when life can't get more complicated, Zach returns to the menu. VERDICT Bate (The Girls' Guide To Love and Supper Clubs) serves up a story that doesn't quite satisfy. Plot points about betrayal and forgiveness don't quite ring true.--Susan Santa, Syosset P.L., NY

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2014
As in her debut (The Girls' Guide to Love and Supper Clubs, 2013), Bate has a female protagonist who's been unlucky in love, works at a job she tolerates while lusting to be in the food industry, and takes a big risk to get there. When Sydney Strauss is laid off from her TV producing job in Washington, D.C., the only work she can find is helping a baker sell his wares at farmers' markets. Then she meets Jeremy Brauer, notorious for taking money for his food reviews in the Washington Chronicle years earlier; though she considers him sleazy, he arouses feelings that she hasn't had since breaking up with her high-school soul mate, Zach, when she found him cheating. When Jeremy, in a PR job for national chain Green Grocers, confides to Sydney something he's learned by error about his employer, she considers this an opportunity to break into food journalism, even though readers will want to shout Noooo. In smart and crisp prose, Bate tells a winning story about food, love, and second chances, with recipes appended. Great fun.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)