Savor You doesn’t stick around long enough to make a connection
Kristen Proby’s Savor You speeds up in the second half, making it difficult to believe in its still-pretty-cute romance.
On the one hand, Kristen Proby’s Savor You, sent this reviewer’s way by William Morrow, has quite the concept: Camden Sawyer and Mia Palazzo hastily married about a decade ago because of a (false) positive pregnancy test. Now, a decade later, they’re both successful chefs — he on TV, she in a restaurant named Seduction — and a new project has them back together. Turns out the chemistry didn’t die.
In that respect, Savor You works just fine. Readers see both sides of the relationship, since chapters alternate between the two perspectives. Camden admires; Mia frets a lot because of her size. (Although the cover model looks quite average, a doctor tells her she could lose 50 pounds in the story, which is uncomfortable despite being a commonly recognized thing in the real world.) This means that we spend a lot of time with Camden reassuring her.
Sure, insecurity is a pretty common theme in romance. However, when a book like Savor You comes around, and insecurity and having trouble trusting others to run your restaurant are your heroine’s two biggest traits, it seems like an issue. There’s room for other things — the embarrassing parents show up and so on — but Mia spends a significant amount of time worrying that Camden is somehow stooping down in order to date her, even as the book jumps forward in time in the back half.
It’s a shame, because when this book is on, it is pretty good. There are some endearingly realistic moments as well as some spicy ones. However, everything flies by so fast that it’s difficult to enjoy things. (You do not know what it cost me to avoid making a joke about the title of the book being reviewed.)
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Ultimately, to make perhaps a facile comparison, Savor You is more like a stop you make on a road trip for French fries and a soda rather than a full three-course meal. It doesn’t stay with you for too long. Although it might taste good in the moment, you know there’s better down the road.