Susan Conant

Cook the Books

admin — Fri, 28 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Cook the Books is part of a series of mystery books (Gourmet Girl Mysteries) by mother-daughter writing team Jessica Conant-Park and Susan Conant.

Chloe is a graduate student in her mid twenties, who lives by herself and has a passion for food. She has an incredibly gorgeous best friend named Adrianna, who is married to a goofy but honest and lovable free-spirited (broke) man named Owen. They have a delightful little bundle of joy named Patrick, who happens to melt Chloe’s heart so much that she overspends and ends up in debt because she just can’t resist buying him all the expensive toys and clothes she sets her eyes on; he’s that adorable. Then there’s Josh, her ex-boyfriend, a chef, who left a year before for a better job in Hawaii and left her behind.

Did you get all this? If you didn’t it’s okay because once you start reading the novel, this will be retold in pretty much every chapter. Do you want to know what else is constantly repeated? The word “Josh.” It comes up in every other sentence. Of course there’s more to the novel: there’s murder, there’s cooking, and there’s a villain (or many?). More importantly, at the end Josh returns to make everything alright (because he’s perfect). But don’t worry, I haven’t spoiled the end; you can guess that one by the end of the fourth chapter.

The story itself is pretty bland but its biggest sin is mainly that it’s not very relatable. Chloe is supposed to be young, bright and independent, and yet she appears to be everything but. Why am I supposed to care about this character? She has no true interests other than her godson, the lives of other cooks and her ex-boyfriend. It probably doesn’t help that the novel is written with a significant amount of dialogue, which, for the most part, is heavily contrived. For example, Chloe’s employer, a serious man in his mid-thirties has just met new mommy Adrianna and all three of them are sitting down for dinner, his treat:

“And Adrianna,“ he said to my friend, “you especially should eat a lot, since you probably have no time to eat while taking care of a tiny baby, huh?”

This was not meant to be funny, or sarcastic (or creepy) but rather to portray what a great guy Chloe’s employer is! The entire novel is written in this type of dialogue, which aside from being annoyingly predictable, becomes overly repetitive.

Cook the Books is filled with bad cliches and references. The murder that sets motion to the core of the storyline leads to Chloe’s view to the “dark” side of cooking, the cutthroat competitive world of chefs. It’s in fact the same world described by so many other chefs, except that in this case, it’s overly dramatic.

The book cover includes a review blurb promising "snappy dialogue, puzzling murder and mouthwatering menus," which I guess is what fueled my disappointment, as I did believe it. In contrast to other mystery novels that portray unlikely heroines, Cook the Books didn’t hit the mark, It has no sparkle and the heroine lacks a sense of self and definition. It was difficult to really care. It could have been light, fun reading, if only it had been half as long. If I was to recommend the book, it I would assume pre-teens might not mind it, but I don’t know how memorable it would be.

There are some recipes added at the end of the book, which only adds to my confusion as to who the target group for this book is supposed to be. The recipes are courtesy of other authors and chefs. Some are easy enough to follow and make (the Baked Tomato Nests), and some (like the Grilled Ohio Lamb Steak) are meant for the serious cooks who strives to entertain. The Baked Tomato Nests are a cute and fast idea, and in fact, the recipe jumped out at me from one of the actual chapters of the novel, so there was a nice connection there. However, overall the recipes were not very innovative, and in a way, that echoes my overall impression of the book.

To put it simply: it didn’t leave a bad taste in my mouth, it needed spice (cayenne, Habanero, or even just plain old pepper)—it was just too bland.

Written by: Jessica Sánchez, May 27th 2010

Fed Up

admin — Fri, 29 May 2009 09:46:00 +0000

By Jessica Conant-Park, Susan Conant

Berkeley Prime Crime

Given the strained and perilous relationship I have with my own mother, I have a lot of admiration for any mother-daughter pair that get along well enough to successfully negotiate the writing of a novel. That said, Fed Up could have been a lot better than it was.

I give the authors points for creating a strong and opinionated female character, Chloe, who solves the mystery of a poisoned woman on her own through a rough mixture of luck and logic. Apart from the protagonist, I found a lot to underline and scribble about in anger. Every female character that was introduced, apart from Chloe’s blonde, pregnant, about-to-be-married best friend, was negatively described in terms of clothing, the amount of makeup worn (less is ugly, more is good), and body type (“slightly plump,” or “almost scrawny” or “blah and shapeless”). I would have thought that writers, especially women, would have moved on from the sexist device of making their likeable characters beautiful, and all other women ugly, as decreed by Vogue. I have no intention of warming up more to the sexy and curvaceous characters than to the ones whose haircuts do not flatter their face shapes.

The characters are all heterosexual, almost all white, and consistently upper-middle class. Chloe is in graduate school because her uncle’s will states that she has to obtain a master’s degree before she can collect her inheritance. She’s quite a snob about the correct type of cracker to spread cheese on, and the differences between how white and red wines ought to be served.

At the beginning of the novel there is some lip service played towards how lovely it would be if the cooking show/contest at the center of the plot was targeting unsuspecting middle- and lower-income families to cook surprise gourmet meals for, instead of searching for affluent audiences, but this thought is never expanded on. At another point in the story, Chloe has a three-line-each exchange with her mother’s new assistant over the need to supply cheaper, environmentally friendly gardening and landscaping solutions to the less wealthy. But class issues are never serious for the girl whose parents are paying for her best friend’s entire wedding. At most, Chloe seems to believe that providing rain barrels to rich people, hidden in designs that match their homes or garden styles, is a “political” concern.

All in all, Fed Up was entertaining, which is perhaps what it was meant to be. I still found it hard to believe that after watching a woman die on a bathroom floor, vapid Chloe was traumatized only up until the next day when she went over to see her best friend, who did her hair because, “the best route to feeling good is looking good.”

Written by: Ilinca Popescu, May 29th 2009

Steamed: A Gourmet Girl Mystery

admin — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 19:06:00 +0000

By Jessica Conant-Park, Susan Conant

Berkley Books

Steamed is a beach-book that should have been broadcasted—Law and Order _meets _The Naked Chef. This book is formulaic TV on paper, addictive with a pinch of sex appeal. Despite being a truly page-turning story, Steamed can be described in many ways, but does very little with the power of literary description, character and plot development, or genre.

Jessica Conant-Park and Susan Conant, a mother-daughter team, get together to write what is the younger's first book. (Susan is the writer of the Dog Lover's Mysteries and Cat Lover's Mysteries). Clearly drawing from Jessica's experiences—from her background in social work and her marriage to Chef William Park—the authors script a picture of a twenty-five-year-old, semi-jaded heiress on the prowl for new love—regarding men and food—in Massachusetts.

Master's student, social worker, and not-so-hopeful Chloe Carter has rotten luck when her blind, online date is murdered at a swank new restaurant in Boston. As if this isn't enough to send readers reeling, Carter gets caught up in an unreal web of lies with her dead date's parents while a relationship with the prime murder suspect comes to a rolling boil. All ends more-or-less realistically, restaurant politics considered.

Writing 101: who, what, when, where, why and how. Since readers are not characters or active participators in any piece of writing (save choose-your-own-adventure), we need help seeing our way through a story. All I can say is: Help!

The first bite of this book doesn't give us any clues to form a basic picture our minds. For example the book begins, "On Saturday morning, I woke up at eight, poured a nasty cup of coffee, and plopped myself at my kitchen table to do some early morning people watching out the window. I sipped my coffee-sludge and peered down at the street." In this moment, what I am looking for is a wisp of red, sleep-knotted hair, a coffee spot on Chloe's green, terry cloth robe. Can I have the corner of a red-brick building, a sad awning that should have been replaced ten years ago, or a line of small, carefully trimmed hedges? From this introduction to Steamed, the story moves into a bit of an entertaining, light-hearted tangent that does nothing to orient the reader in Chloe's apartment or introduce us to who she.

The problem persists when describing food—a feature this book claims to offer. I am not a gourmet-eater from Boston. I can relate to the doughy, unhappy appearance of stuck-together spaghetti. "So damn good?" Readers who are not foie gras ravioli connoisseurs will need to go taste the dish to know how the food is supposed to taste or look. The text doesn't do it. Also, it is far too many pages into the book before we have a dash of an idea about what Chloe looks like—thank goodness for the representative front cover or I might never know how she is able to snag Magellan chef-hunk, Josh Driscoll.

The Conant duo does reference specific Massachusettes eateries, kudos, that a local might instantly be able to reference as rapidly as the vision of Madonna in "Like a Virgin," but the rest of us are left with little to work off. Can Eagle's Deli also be all-day deli that manages to serve dishes on oily wax paper wrap and peeling, yellow Formica tables?

I would have liked to see Chloe develop as a character through her bizarre experiences. She doesn't. Her character starts as only a semi-sweet, mildly-likable student. And while the authors allude to a shift in her opinion about getting an advanced degree in social work, Chloe never crosses over with a realization about who she is or what it might mean to be a social worker - with or without her experiences with death and deceit. The plot would benefit from Chloe implementing more of her fledgling psychoanalytic skills on anything or anyone; they are lightly used as an aid in discovering the truth, but there is no real value placed on her education by the authors or the character herself. Instead readers waste time with Braids in scenes which contributed little to the story—even Chloe avoids them. The book's lack of character evolution and surface plot are missed opportunities for even sous chef status much less an executive position among books. I was not satiated.

All of this criticism considered, and probably most important of all, what am I watching and why? In other words, what was the Conant pair trying to achieve, and did they succeed? I don't know, and I don't know; I can't answer part one of the question, so I can't answer part two. The authors' goal is not clear to me, and therefore, their result isn't either. Genre is a problem. If the book were prepared as a meringue-inspired beach book, a gourmet mystery, I'd say perfecto! But if it was supposed to be a deeper, inward book about a gourmet girl at a specific point in her life, about a girl who gets burned yet saves the day and comes out on top, I'd have to skimp on the stars. Did the authors intend to write a dainty appetizer or failed meat dish?

Initially, I thought appetizer. Time and effort are spent on plot development—setting up the decoy suspect, who seems the least bit concerned about his implication, and introducing possible but not plausible alternative suspects and tiny clues for the attentive reader. The who-done-it mystery is light-hearted and fun to say the least, but there is considerable time spent on Chloe. Chloe's rambling thoughts and Chloe's love life come in streams of well written, relatable, internal commentary that last for a page or more at a time. While readers won't know much about the physicality of Chloe's world, they do very clearly see her entertaining and fickle twenty-five-year-old mind. Failed meat dish?

So who should read this book? If you like Boston-based food politics, have read all the National Best Sellers since the 1980s, and are dozing on the beach, read on. Otherwise, find the dessert table.

Written by: Jennifer Shaw, April 12th 2008