Savor You by Kristen Proby is a romance featuring female friendships, food pr0n and a plus sized heroine. I enjoyed everything except the hero, who I felt infantilized the heroine on occasion.
Savor You is the fifth book in the Fusion series, set around restaurant called Seduction that a group of female friends opened together. Despite this book’s position later in the series order, it can be read as a standalone. The heroine of the novel is Mia Palazzo, the head chef of the restaurant. Mia has worked hard to achieve success in the culinary world, and she hasn’t had a lot of time for relationships as a result. When the TV show Best Bites wants to feature Seduction on one of its episodes, it’s great exposure for the restaurant. Unfortunately Best Bites is hosted by Mia’s ex husband, Camden Sawyer, a celebrity chef.
Cam and Mia were married very briefly during culinary school. They weren’t officially a couple, but were sleeping together, and had a pregnancy scare. Mia thought Cam married her because she was pregnant, so when she found out she wasn’t, she freaked out, left Cam a note, moved, and annulled their marriage. Fortunately, in the rest of the book, Mia makes more thoughtful and considered decisions although she’s still commitment shy.
So Cam and Mia are in close proximity and all the feelings they had for each other fire up again, but Mia isn’t ready to commit even though Cam is. That’s pretty much the entire conflict.
Mia has self-esteem issues, mostly related to her weight. Her body type is never really specified although at one point Mia’s doctor tells her that she would be healthier if she lost fifty pounds and says that she’s clinically obese. BMI is not a good way of determining someone’s health or body type, however, and it’s largely left up to the reader to determine how Mia looks. Mia’s mom makes the comment that she has “birthing hips” but literally every mammal which is 1. in possession of hips and b. capable of giving live birth does too. I don’t feel that the book fixated on Mia’s weight. Instead, it was one of several reasons Mia felt afraid of commitment.
The other reason is that Mia is incredibly busy and successful and it’s hard to find someone who understands the demands her job puts on her time. Cam, being a chef himself, gets it. Or he should.
These were the parts where Cam annoyed me. He chastises Mia for not taking care of herself and pushing herself too far. She puts in long hours. She doesn’t make time for a social life. Sometimes Cam’s insistence that Mia take some time off felt like he was infantilizing her or he was totally out of sync with the realities of her job.
Mia does overdo it with regard to time spent at work, but she’s starting a new business in a tough industry. Her job would require that level of commitment and hard work initially. She’s not making bad choices for herself because she doesn’t understand the consequences, and I never got the impression she was seriously burned out either, at least not in the sense that her physical or mental health were in jeopardy.
I have fibromyalgia and sometimes I push myself too hard with regard to my job. There are days I should not go to work considering the amount of pain I’m in, but sometimes shit happens. Sometimes we’re short staffed. Sometimes our fiscal year is ending and I have work that has a deadline I can’t miss. I know when I push I’ll likely pay the price later, but the realities of my position sometimes outweigh the consideration to my immediate health, and I try to keep a balance between the two.
So maybe I felt a little personally attacked by Cam’s insistence that Mia was taking too much on, but I also felt that comments like that rarely get made to men. Professional, ambitious men are supposed to “live at the office.” Women who do that aren’t prioritizing correctly.
And Cam does have his good moments. He can be nurturing and caring, and he snuggles Mia through period cramps. He apparently makes an amazing cheesecake.
Did I mention this book made me hungry?
For me the relationships I really cared about were between Mia and her girlfriends/ co-owners. They take care of each other with compliments and spa days and glasses of wine and small kindnesses . Despite being romance novel heroines who have already found their One True Loves, they talk honestly about how sometimes they are just too tired to have sex. Or not in the mood because he’s a morning person and they aren’t. They talk about how having sex in water is uncomfortable because it washes away natural lubrication (at one point Mia stops Cam from going farther than fooling around in the shower, explains why, and they accommodate her so the sex won’t be uncomfortable). These relationships felt real, and organic and honest, and I loved them. Unfortunately for me, because Cam was less consistent as a friend to Mia, and because I saw his behavior as infantilizing and sexist, Mia’s relationship with her friends outshined her relationship with Cam.
And really, I must warn you again: I do not recommend reading this book while hungry. I was drooling over the food mentioned. I can’t even be trusted to make toast and honestly, my snack situation is pretty dire. My cabinets hold a lot of tea and if my husband didn’t cook my fridge would only be filled with cold brew and diet soda.
This book made me eat cake for lunch. Twice.
So while I loved the female friendships in Savor You, appreciated all the foodie references, and thought it handled the subject of Mia’s weight appropriately, I felt like it had a void left by a less-than-amazing hero. Now I’m going to go get some cheesecake.
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I guess I have a different opinion about telling people to look after themselves. I work in a care industry where the suicide rate is 4x the general population. I get told not uncommonly by my colleagues (and I have made the same comments to them) on occasion that I need to look after myself. I don’t view this as infantilisation. I view this as caring. During my residency I did not practice self care at all in any way and this resulted in a serious mental health crisis. I still struggle with self care and I see many if my colleagues struggle as well. If I see them working too hard I say something. I don’t wait for them to burn out. We are not always the best judge of how much we can deal with. None of us want to appear weak or incapable. Sorry if I offend with this but like you this is a touchy topic for me
I agree with Bronte on this. I work three jobs. It’s because of my husband and my friends that my self care has vastly improved over the past few years. Like with Bronte, I work in two industries (journalism and comics) where burnout and lack of self care are pretty rampant. I don’t see their worry about me as infantilisation either, because they’re right. I work way too much and rest far too little. I didn’t have a social life for the first six years I worked at the newspaper I’m at now. I’m far happier now that I do.
I actually didn’t realize how worried my husband was about me regarding it until he told me how glad he was that I had a social life outside of work. When he tells me that he’s worried about me, it’s a sign that I have definitely pushed myself too far (and he does so in a way that is romantic hero swoon-worthy.)
Okay, I’ll chime in for Team Unless You’re Going to Do My Work and Pay Me for Lost Wages and Pay for Whatever Leisure You Suggest and Accept the Consequences for Failure, Don’t Tell Me How to Live Like You Know Best.
There are periods (for ex, when one is launching a new business) that demand more effort than periods when one is comfortably established (for ex, when one is a celebrity chef/television host). If a man in a cushy place in life tells a woman embarking on the next stage of her career to slow down, it sounds more like “I enjoy being leagues ahead of you, fellow culinary school classmate, so don’t take any steps that might narrow that gap.”
Yes, self-care is important, but there are times when it isn’t practical because nothing on the to-do list is optional. There’s a huge difference between being supportive during those times and acting like everything the overburdened party has to do is unimportant and can just be blown off for a spa day.
Speaking of which, my daughter told me yesterday the term “self-care” has always made her snarly because it’s usually presented in terms of massages and spa days and vacations, which fall under the umbrella of “things reserved for rich people.” It dawned on her that when you care for a child, it means they’re fed decently and get to bed at a reasonable hour and see a doctor when they’re sick, not that they’re pampered and indulged. Now that she’s reframed “self-care” in accessible terms, she sees more value in it–and she’ll get right on it as soon as she’s through certification exams that are necessary to better her life in the long-term.
My hubby is a workahollc and his work hours have been a major source of conflict in our marriage. In this case, the man is absolutely told he works too much. By me.
I see both sides, but I’d come down with Ren & Elyse on the “would you say that if I were a man,” maybe because I live in L.A. and the entertainment-industry stories wash over me all the time and WOW do women hear about how bad it is to “push themselves” but then ten years down the road WOW do they hear about how they should have “tried harder” when they were younger.
Fuck the patriarchy.
My tenured boss with an Upper East Side apartment is always telling me I should take a vacation, to the point of offering to let me come to her beach house on Long Island.
It is true that I can’t remember the last time I took a day off that wasn’t because I was too sick to move or because it was a High Holiday. It is also true that I’m stressed and depressed and not good at self-care. I could use a vacation, probably.
But another thing that is true is that I work four part-time jobs, my workflow is literally impossible to predict and therefore hard to plan around, and I do not have benefits, which means I don’t have vacation days or sick days or any other kind of days and also pay for my insurance out of pocket. If I don’t work, I don’t get paid. Period.
I’m currently in veterinary school, and we are one of the professions with the highest suicide rates, so we get a lot of self-care messages! Luckily that seems to go to both men and women, and honestly the few men we have might get more stuff targeted at them now bc they are less likely to seek help on their own. At the same time, I personally haaaaaate people tell me I’m overextending myself because believe me I know when I am And I kno the culinary industry can be very stressful and I think we should start telling men in those stressful industries to take more care.
As a side note- Laura Florand has several excellent books about people in the culinary industry who via the romantic relationships decide to take more time for themselves (both men and women) while still feeling fulfilled in their careers and I really appreciated those elements.
I am Team Why Can’t We Get An Accurate Representation Of The Heroine On The Cover Of Her Own Goddamn Book.
@Rose: I feel like the heroine is nearly accurate on the cover, though I wish we could see more of her. But that’s just my interpretation of what I can see.
I have more vacation time stockpiled than I can use, and I truly can’t use it, since my employee just quit and I don’t know if there’s money to replace him. My boss is always telling me to take time off, but every time I do, there’s a nightmare to come back to, and it’s hard to relax knowing things are piling up. Fortunately, I love the work, but it’s unrealistic to walk away when I am the one who does all the keep-the-lights-on things and the one everyone comes to with questions. And I’ve worked 10 years to get to this place, and I’m not giving it up. I work with a man who gets 80% more respect than I do just for walking in the room, and he’s worthless at everything except kissing up. So yeah, work/life balance, maybe not just now.
@Amanda You could definitely be right–the placement makes it difficult to tell exactly how the cover model is shaped. But I do feel that if the book makes a point of featuring a plus-size heroine, the cover should follow suit and proudly feature a gorgeous plus-size woman. Or mermaid. Or honeybadger.