Review: Can’t Stand the Heat, by Louisa Edwards

Can’t Stand the Heat, a contemporary romance set in New York, is Louisa Edwards’ debut novel. Adam Temple is a hotshot young chef, about to open his first restaurant, “Market”, and Miranda Wake is a “notorious” food critic known for “exacting standards”. How’s that for conflict? But wait, there’s more: in the opening scene, a party for Market, a drunk and very hungry Miranda interrupts Adam’s speech (“I don’t want to impress you. I want to nourish you”) by rudely asking where the hell the food is. This precipitates a dare (“You wouldn’t last ten minutes in my kitchen”) which Miranda can’t refuse. Much to the delight of her editor, Miranda agrees to work in Market’s kitchen for a month, producing a series of articles called “Dish it Out: The Adventures of a Critic in the Kitchen.”

But rather than using the kitchen as a convenient sexual gymnasium (as the cover, alas, implies), Edwards immerses the reader in the world of big city nouvelle cuisine. Through Miranda’s observant eyes, we learn how a high fashion kitchen works, from the managers, to the wait staff, to the dishwashers, to the line cooks, to the young externs from the culinary school. We even visit farmers’ markets with Adam, seeing him interact with vendors and plan his menus. It may sound a little dull if you are not interested in food (it’s nirvana if you are), but here’s the thing: Edwards manages to saturate this book with fascinating cooking and restaurant business details by weaving them seamlessly into the characters and plot. I never felt like the victim of an info dump. I just felt like I was being told a very interesting story about a world I don’t know by someone who knew what she was talking about.

And here’s another unexpected bonus: a wonderful secondary romance between Miranda’s younger brother, Jess, and an employee of Adam’s. Nineteen year old Jess is a closeted gay man (something we find out very early on), just learning to accept his sexuality. Miranda, several years his senior, basically raised Jess when their parents were killed. Both Jess’s sexual awakening  and the development of his relationship with Miranda, who has always been a mother figure, provided some of the most compelling moments –both romantic and dramatic — in the book.

This is a romance between adults. Although I love contemporaries, one common problem is the invention of internal conflict. Neither Adam nor Miranda really have any inner reason not to fall in love. In that sense, this is a low conflict romance, something I really enjoy.  At most, Miranda’s self-reliance leads her to be somewhat closed off, an aspect of her personality which the emotional and open Adam has trouble with. It’s very satisfying and realistic.

I know some romance readers like a high internal conflict romance because that kind of conflict tends to produce a lot of sexual tension. This book is proof that sexual tension is not necessary for a very sexy read. Imagine, these mature individuals were actually able to work side by side together without jabbing each other every five seconds with his erection of steel and her pebbled nipples!

The “food critic” versus “chef” conflict peters out naturally as Miranda and Adam get to know one another, but two external conflicts crop up, one related to her brother’s relationship with Adam’s friend, and another related to what Miranda can and can’t say about goings on in the kitchen for her audience. Miranda really messes them both up, in a pretty wince-inducing and heartbreaking way.  That I cared so much about hurt done not only to Adam, but to Jess and others in the book is a testament to how well Edwards fleshed out several secondary characters.

One thing I found interesting was the difference Miranda identified early on between Adam and herself. She thinks, “Writing reviews was a job. A good job, one she’d pushed hard to get, and continued to strive to do well. But it was still, in the end, work. Adam didn’t work in the kitchen. He lived it, breathed it, embodied it.” I bet you thought that since I have Simone de Beauvoir in my banner, that I was going to complain about this. Hell no! Some relationships thrive on equal passion for work, but some require one partner to subordinate his or her own career to some extent for a partner.  Miranda is very insightful, and her early acceptance of Adam’s passion for the restaurant helped me to believe in their HEA.

A couple of things didn’t work for me. For one thing, Miranda doesn’t know the first thing about cooking. This gives Adam an excuse to take her back to his apartment and give her cooking lessons, but the idea that a major big city food critic can’t even poach an egg threw me out of the story. Food critics need to be great writers and have great palates, as Miranda does, but I am pretty sure most of them have at least some cooking school or kitchen experience.

A second thing is a weakness that is the other side of a strength. I really liked the way the “foodiness” found its way into Adam’s thinking, but sentences like, “The idea lit up Adam’s mind like the power burner on his Viking range”, or “This was a woman coming apart like an overcooked sauce”, or “Miranda’s eyes popped open like he’s slipped her a surprise jalapeno pepper” got to be too much of a good thing after a while.

Kind of like that last bite of a too-big slice of German chocolate cake.

Something I haven’t touched on is the amount of humor in the book. Although I would not call it a light hearted romp, in several places it really is very funny.

Overall, I really enjoyed Can’t Stand the Heat.  An added bonus is several recipes at the end, followed by an excerpt of Edwards’ next book (spring 2010, I think), which features a conceited gorgeous celebrity chef whom we got to know in Can’t Stand the Heat. I will definitely be reading it.