altlovesbooks

I thought this book was a fascinating look into the NYC restaurant industry, from a front-of-house point of view instead of your standard chef/back-of-house view. From his unique position and career in the restaurant industry, we get a lot of info about how a restaurant operates when seating diners, how the staff interacts up front, and all the myriad ways guests either intentionally or accidentally make a restaurant's night hell.

Yes, the restaurant industry is rife with sex, drugs, and alcohol. That was true in the 80s, and while outside scrutiny has improved working conditions overall, remains mostly true today. What I enjoyed most about this book aside from the insider tips and anecdotes was seeing the author go through a bit of character development and distancing himself from these things as his career progresses. People rating this book poorly because they don't agree with the author's lifestyle choices aren't giving the book the chance it deserves, in my opinion.

Just a really interesting, entertaining book about an industry I don't work in, but am fascinated by.

"I'd finally met someone with bigger control issues than I had."

Georgia's great-grandmother Scarlett passed away and left her everything, including control of her book rights, one left unfinished. Georgia's mom, eager for a payday to gamble away, poses as Georgia to get a publisher to find a writer to finish Scarlett's book. Enter Noah, modern fiction writer, arrogance personified. Georgia stubbornly wants to leave Scarlett's book unfinished, Noah stubbornly/arrogantly wants to finish Scarlett's book. Georgia reluctantly agrees, and the two start going through Scarlett's old letters between her and her pilot husband, while also working through their myriad control issues.

This story's told from two POVs, obviously Georgia and Noah are the modern couple finishing the book, but we also get Scarlett's POV from her relationship with Jameson during WWII. Jameson is a pilot, Scarlett is a plotter, and the two are basically head over heels for each other immediately.

I think of the two POVs, Scarlett/Jameson was my favorite. While they do fall in love pretty much instantly (and instalove makes my teeth hurt), I felt like Scarlett had her principles in the right places, felt like she had a voice and mattered to the plot, and overall just felt like a good person. On the other side of the coin, I felt like Noah and Georgia were annoying as characters. I wish more had been done to develop them and their relationship, because it felt like it only took one (not very eventful) rock climbing trip for Georgia to turn a 180 from being annoyed at/bothered by Noah to banging him. They're both kind of unpleasant in how they treated each other until then, and then afterwards it's like it never happened and they're all lovey dovey.

I also see a lot (the majority?) of people here saying how emotionally wrecked they were after reading this, and maybe my sad gene is broken, but I didn't feel particularly much of anything. Maybe I shouldn't have read The Women by Kristin Hannah before this, because that book did for me what this book didn't.

Finally, this may be me reading between the lines and projecting too much, but I also didn't like how much shade the author threw at Noah for being not a Romance writer, for having the audacity to have sad endings in his Fiction books, and just a general feeling that if you don't read Romance you're doing it wrong. It just felt weirdly pointed whenever it was mentioned by Georgia in-story.

It was okay, I guess is my summary. I didn't dislike it in any strong way, I just felt like it was missing something to make me either care/feel sad about the WWII story, or to sell me on Noah/Georgia being a good match for each other.

Kind of a book that makes you want to quit your job and go visit Yellowstone. This is my second Peter Heller book, and I enjoyed this one more than the other one I read a few months ago (Burn). It's not without flaws, but I loved how the author can paint a scene.

The story follows the point of view of a Yellowstone park ranger, Ren, who makes a living monitoring the park, saving tourists from themselves, and keeping an eye out for illegal hunting. We meet a small cast of characters who either work in Yellowstone themselves, or in the nearby town, one of these being Hilly, a wolf biologist. She lives and breathes wolves, has a temper, and manages to get on the wrong side of the wrong person in town. A trap is laid out, but not for a wolf, and Ren gets pulled into finding the culprit.

Up front I'll say that this is a really slow burn mystery that really isn't all that mysterious. I'd say the flow of the story is pretty well broadcast throughout, so I wasn't particularly startled at how things played out in the end. But what really did it for me with this book was the way the author depicted life in Yellowstone. Amidst Ren's investigation we get small little vignettes of him doing park ranger things, and even though this is a fiction book, every bit of it rings true to how I imagine things playing out. We also get flashbacks into Ren's past with a late wife he lost to illness, and by the end of the book I was rooting for him to find some measure of peace of mind. I wasn't quite as on board with Hilly's use of wolf euphemisms near the end of the book, but I guess when wolves are what you know, that's how you look at life.

Just a nice book about a park I really want to visit one day.