Comfort Foods by Kimberly Fish – Book Review

⭐️⭐️Today I’m jumping on the Lone Star Book Blog Tour for Comfort Foods, a delicious addition to author Kimberly Fish’s series set in Comfort, Texas. Read on for my thoughts on the novel, enter the fantastic giveaway, and take a look at the other blogs on the tour stop – we’ve got some great content for you!

Many thanks to Lone Star Book Blog Tours and the author for providing a copy of the book. All opinions are my own.

 

COMFORT FOODS: 
A Comfort Stories Stand-Alone Novel 
by
Kimberly Fish

Categories: Contemporary / Second Chance Romance
Publisher: Fish Tales Publishing
Date of Publication: October 7, 2020
Number of Pages: 385 pages 

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SYNOPSIS

From the award-winning author of Comfort Plans and Comfort Songs comes a story of two rising stars blitzed by social media. Lacy Cavanaugh and single-dad Rudy Delgardo live a hundred miles apart but meet in the worst possible way. Working at a weekly paper and creating social media for area businesses helps Lacy connect with locals who open her mind to a perspective beyond Instagram. In launching a food-and-wine festival to support Comfort’s new event center, she discovers surprising skills bubbling over, much like the food she’s attempting to cook.

Rudy, on the brink of his restaurant’s takeover, struggles to improve time management so he can create a better relationship with his daughter. Distracted by Lacy and her invitation to the festival, he’s tempted by her beauty, wit, and courage, but as a chef, he rarely gets to enjoy life outside the kitchen. Enemies, illness, and exes add unwelcome spice to the dish they’re concocting—one that will teeter with misunderstanding until the very end.

Will Lacy and Rudy embrace their second chances and discover the perfect seasonings of family, resilience, and grace to create a handwritten recipe of love that will stand the test of time?

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REVIEW

In Comfort Foods, author Kimberly Fish returns to her Comfort, Texas setting where Lacy Cavanaugh is begrudgingly working for the local weekly newspaper, and staying far away from Dallas and the social media debacle that landed her back in Comfort. Lacy is a former beauty queen, former Instagram “influencer”, and at the start, we find her resisting settling into her new, hopefully, temporary life. And I admit, initially, I didn’t think I was going to like her much, particularly in the descriptions of her perfect looks, and nickname “The Blonde Goddess”.

However, the more Fish lets us into Lacy’s life, the more interesting this character reveals herself to be.  She speaks her mind while sticking to the rules of her banishment to Comfort (including no iPhone), connects with Gloria, her landlord, and learns how to cook a bit along the way. Her sister Kali and friend AJ bring her into their plans to host a food and wine festival in Comfort – which is how she initially meets Chef Rudy Delgado.

Rudy is also an interesting, wounded, complicated character. He’s a single dad, dealing with a difficult controlling ex. He admits he wasn’t an attentive husband and involved father when they were first married, but he’s doing his best to be a good dad to his spunky, adorable daughter Luna now.  His restaurant is facing bad reviews and some social media fallout of its own, and he’s got ex problems to boot, making his life a complicated mess. He lives in Austin, which provides some fun flavor to the setting while throwing another wrench into their relationship with its distance from Comfort.

Both characters have personal flaws to overcome, and their timing for a relationship is terrible – and they each handle their personal bad timings, well, badly. Thankfully, both characters go through a lot of personal growth. Lacy ultimately grows and finds her path.

This is the story of a woman really growing up and figuring out who she is and what she wants, and what home means to her. It’s a story of redemption, and of second chances – for Lacy and for Rudy. Both come up against challenges and manipulations that will have you rooting for them. It was a balm for the soul to watch them face their manipulators head-on.

While parts of the book involve food, it’s not a book ABOUT food (although Fish does include a few recipes at the end.) It IS a book that touches the senses, with images and imagined scents of the lavender fields, the smells of the goats and the cheeses, the descriptions of the colors of Rudy’s restaurant or Lacy’s clothes. The author brings you into the book with all of your senses and left me longing to escape my own North Texas environs and escape into Hill Country. 

And she left me hungry for parmesan truffle fries!

This book is part of Fish’s Comfort Stories series but works just fine as a standalone. That said, while I’ve read Comfort Songs, finishing up this book makes me want to revisit that book. I dug into my Kindle and found that I had purchased Comfort Plans, and that book now moves to the head of my TBR list, because the characters and setting of Comfort Foods was just what my weary heart needed right now.

I’m giving Comfort Foods four-and-a-half stars (rounding to five for Amazon and Goodreads).

 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Author Kimberly Fish resides in Longview, Texas, and enjoys writing contemporary fiction set in the Hill Country. During the seven years she lived in San Antonio, wandering in and around Comfort, Texas, provided endless space for her imagination to develop stories of women discovering their grit. She studied the small Texas town that had seemingly dug its heels into the limestone and refused modern development and thought that was fertile ground for stories about women remodeling their lives. It made a juxtaposition of place and purpose that was hard to ignore. Plus, anything that takes intentional effort has a much higher value than the things that come easily—Comfort personifies this, and the novels remind readers that anything worth having is worth the work.

Comfort Foods is the third full-length novel in the set, Fiction from the Texas Hill Country, and follows behind the award-winning novels Comfort Plans and Comfort Songs. A novella, Emeralds Mark the Spot, is available as a free eBook download to subscribers of the incredibly sporadic newsletter at kimberlyfish.com and is the original story from which all other Comfort novels grew.

 

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COMFORT FOODS GIVEAWAY 

ONE WINNER 

GRANDPRIZE (US only):
Signed copy of COMFORT FOODS + Ina Garten’s MODERN COMFORT FOOD

Ends Midnight, CST, January 22, 2021