This book should not be read while hungry–and I’m saying this, as a vegan who couldn’t eat about 90% of the things they sample in this book. (I am currently in the middle of making lunch, and honestly this book shouldn’t be thought of while hungry either) (ugh the lunch came out badly and now I’m too grumpy to try again)
There is a romance plot here–best summed as “chaotic bisexual exes sleep and eat their way through Europe in a misguided attempt to prove how over each other they are (spoiler alert: they are not)” but really it’s about 75-100 pages of that and like 200+ pages of:
Waiters bring around bottles of cold white wine and a parade of seafood antipasti–fileted anchovies brined in lemon and olive oil, squid braised in their own ink, herbed octopus. Then come plates of fresh-cut pasta drenched with cuttlefish ink and clattering with mussels and clams, and then fat-bellied amberjack that fleam like they’re still dewy from the fisherman’s hold.
See what I mean? I literally can’t eat anything in that entire passage and even I can appreciate the descriptions. What is amberjack? I don’t know, but I imagine it being lit by soft candlelight and then devoured a la Babette’s Feast. The book proceeds much in this same vein, the pages snapping by with the faint sounds of crunchy, rustic farmer’s bread dipped in golden, earthy, buttery olive oil.
Yes, there is also a lot of plot around Kit and Theo (note that one of these people is not pronoun’d in the blurb! how clever) and both of them are definitely working through a lot. They could probably do with more therapy and less hookups, but when in Rome (and many other cities) why concern yourselves with what could have been and why it wasn’t? I enjoyed this quite a bit, more than I did One Last Stop and I Kissed Shara Wheeler but probably on par with Red, White, and Royal Blue.