Holy Guacamole! by Dan and Denise Harmer

Okay ... I had this great, thoughtful review all typed out and ready to post last week. Then Blogger went down for several days and it deleted this post. So ... here's my attempt at re-creating the review. Ugh!

In Holy Guacamole by Dan and Denise Harmer, Trace Domingo has the opportunity of a lifetime when he wins an internship under Chef Bonnie Miller. Upon arriving at her culinary bootcamp, he realizes that this is going to be a much more difficult season than he had anticipated.

The book was good and I honestly wanted to read all the way to the end. That said, the plot was pretty unbelievable and had more twists and turns than I could follow. From culinary bootcamp, to an underground tunnel that Zorro used, to revealing secrets from the past, to a visit with Bonnie's dying father, to a kidnapping by the Mexican mafia, to an orphanage, to randomly adopting two children, and back to culinary bootcamp. See what I mean? It was a little hard to follow. Each piece of the plot was fairly shallowly developed. I felt like the authors had really good ideas for the plot and characters but they could have easily comprised four or five books instead of just one. There were tons of food metaphors throughout the book. While I love a good play on words, some of the metaphors were just downright cheesy ... at least they made me laugh! I was impressed with how the authors made me actually like a completely unlikeable character by the end of the novel. Overall I would give this book three stars.

I received a free copy of this book from Glass Road PR in exchange for my fair and honest review.

About the Book
Nestled along San Diego's coast, the former romantic getaway of the silver screen's most notorious lovers is now the sizzling hacienda of Bonnie Miller's culinary boot camp. "If you are what you eat, make it hot, spicy and irresistible," is her motto, and this queen of Southwestern cuisine enjoys quite a savory life; success, fame, and a reputation for the finest palate west of Barcelona. That is, until a pot-rattling bang causes Trace Domingo, a washed-up sports writer, to crash into her life. His arrival turns up the heat at the culinary boot camp as Bonnie discovers in life's recipe book, it is not the spices which add the most flavor, but how truly hungry you are.