At the news of her mother’s death, Natalie Tan returns home. The two women hadn’t spoken since Natalie left in anger seven years ago, when her mother refused to support her chosen career as a chef. Natalie is shocked to discover the vibrant neighborhood of San Francisco’s Chinatown that she remembers from her childhood is fading, with businesses failing and families moving out. She’s even more surprised to learn she has inherited her grandmother’s restaurant.
The neighborhood seer reads the restaurant’s fortune in the leaves: Natalie must cook three recipes from her grandmother’s cookbook to aid her struggling neighbors before the restaurant will succeed. Unfortunately, Natalie has no desire to help them try to turn things around–she resents the local shopkeepers for leaving her alone to take care of her agoraphobic mother when she was growing up. But with the support of a surprising new friend and a budding romance, Natalie starts to realize that maybe her neighbors really have been there for her all along.
Cover and synopsis from GoodReads
Earlier this year, I was thrilled to learn I had won a GoodReads competition for an ARC of Natalie Tan’s Book of Luck and Fortune by Roselle Lim. How many of these contests had I entered and never won?! I didn’t know much about it, but the cover was gorgeous, and I knew it featured food, so I was sold.
What I loved
The characters
What holds this book together is its characters and their relationship to each other. Throughout the book, Natalie is forming relationships both with her living neighbors and her mother and grandmother who have passed away. She realizes that everyone in her life has a story, and she has been selfish in the way she ignored the neighborhood and her family. I loved seeing how Natalie learned more about her grandmother and mother through journals, letters, and stories from her neighbors, and I adored the friendship she forms with Cecelia, who was her mother’s friend before she passed. They became so tight-knit, and it was refreshing to see an intergenerational friendship like that represented.
The magical realism
This book is overflowing with little sparks of magic. Whether it’s Natalie’s tears turning into crystals or a recipe causing someone’s skin to steam, the descriptions aren’t just metaphors for the reader’s sake—they’re actually happening to the characters. And it was such a fun touch! It took a little bit of adjusting, but that was mostly because I didn’t read the blurb so I wasn’t expecting it (whoops). I loved seeing how the author envisioned the effects the food would have on characters and how that was illustrated.
The food
When reading this book, prepare to be hungry! I swear I was craving Chinese food for a full week while I read it. Roselle Lim’s descriptions are mouthwatering, but also unique and creative—just telling us that something is ‘delicious’ over and over would get boring fast, so Lim instead infuses her writing with vivid images that convey what the food makes characters feel so that the reader feels it too. It felt a little unnecessary to have the entire recipe in the text and then repeat the ingredients again in the prose, so I ended up skimming some of those parts, but I really appreciated her descriptions of the food.
What I disliked
The writing style
Although there were moments of beautiful writing, overall the style just felt . . . clunky. I don’t want to be mean, because I was really rooting for this book. And I did receive a pretty early copy, so I’ll be interested to see if the final book has been edited more. But the sentences were so repetitive, and the prose just felt awkward. Take the opening of chapter eight: “Nothing made me happier than the act of cooking. My happiest memories were of sending time in the kitchen with Ma-ma as we prepared our meals.” Why not cut the first sentence? More than that, it has already been well established that Natalie loves cooking, so this whole bit ends up feeling unnecessary.
I can usually get over a few awkward sentences here and there, but it just seemed like every page had some paragraph that left me cringing. This was really the thing that made my rating of the book so low. Again, I really wanted to like it, but honestly if it hadn’t been an ARC that I wanted to review, I would have DNFed it because of this.
The love interest
Can you say insta-love? I liked the idea of Daniel, a geeky Silicon Valley boy who follows his nose to find Natalie’s food. But when they very first meet, Natalie feels like watching him eat is pornographic (she says this at least twice in the book that I can recall) and can barely talk around him. And I get thinking a guy is hot and you end up tripping over your words. But then when he asks her out, they go for a walk and end up kissing but they’ve said maybe fifteen sentences to each other?? Not only was it annoying, their relationship felt like I was supposed to care about it more, but I couldn’t bring myself to. I was much more interested in Natalie’s relationship with her mother, grandmother, absent father, and other neighbors. Did you notice that? There’s already a lot going on in this book, and so the love interest just seemed shoe-horned in to check off a box, when there are plenty of other characters we care about more.
Overall, it was a quick and fun read. I loved learning more about cooking and Chinese culture, and am so glad to see more diversity in books. But between the stilted writing style and unnecessary love interest, the book fell flat for me.
To order Natalie Tan’s Book of Luck & Fortune by Roselle Lim, click here.
Have you read Natalie Tan’s Book of Luck & Fortune yet? What did you think? Is it on your TBR? Let me know in the comments!
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