What a totally delightful debut!

Feeling adrift after a divorce, Dahlia is shocked when she's selected for a competitive cooking reality show.  There she meets London Parker, the show's first non-binary participant and a frosty exterior that Dahlia is dying to crack.  London can't believe how charmed they are by Dahlia, and as quickly as the competition heats up in the kitchen, things between them start cooking too.  There's no recipes in romance, though - can Dahlia and London make what they have work?

My book group bumped this up on my TBR this week, and I am so glad for it.  Dahlia and London are perfect counterbalances to each other, and London is my favorite kind of love interest, someone who's like "feelings? I am certainly not experiencing them and even if I was I would not admit to it, also I want this person around me all the time and everything they do I deeply adore for reasons I will not disclose."  Their chemistry was so wonderful.

I also really appreciated how London's non-binaryness was addressed throughout the book.  There's one instance in which another participant misgenders them to Dahlia, but the dialogue still uses they/them pronouns for them - Kelley so fully respects their characters that no one's going to misgender them.  Later, London's mother talks about how their dad still wants to refer to them and their sisters as he did before they came out without making excuses for him, and I think that was really great as well, that someone who has known London their entire life is the only one who's able to allude to London's past gender expression on the page besides London themself.

My only real negative about the book is that the writing is a little unrefined at times, clunky and repetitive in some places.  This is the kind of thing that only gets better in time, and I have no doubt that Kelly will continue to write some really remarkable things.  I can't wait.

Thank you to Forever and NetGalley for the ARC!

CW:

queerphobia, non-binary/transphobia, allusions to misgendering, relatively amicable divorce, references to experiencing shame for not knowing if someone wants children.