Good Enough to Eat

by Stacey Ballis

Overview

The last thing Melanie expected to lose when she went on a diet was her husband.

Former lawyer Melanie Hoffman lost half her body weight and opened a gourmet take-out café specializing in healthy and delicious food. Then her husband left her—for a woman twice her size. Immediately afterwards, she's blindsided by a financial crisis. Melanie reaches out to a quirky roommate with a ton of baggage and becomes involved in a budding romance with a local documentary filmmaker.

In this warm and often laugh-out-loud novel, Melanie discovers that she still has a lot to learn about her friends, her relationships with men, and herself-and that her weight loss was just the beginning of an amazing journey that will transform her life from the inside out...

INCLUDES RECIPES

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780425229637
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/07/2010
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	578,060
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Stacey Ballis is the author of ten foodie novels: Inappropriate Men, Sleeping Over, Room for Improvement, The Spinster Sisters, Good Enough to Eat, Off the Menu, Out to Lunch, Recipe for Disaster, Wedding Girl, and How to Change a Life. She is a contributing author to three nonfiction anthologies: Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys, Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume, and Living Jewishly.

Editorial Reviews

Melanie Hoffman and her husband Andrew have been happily married for almost 10 years but when Melanie slims down to a trim size 6 after once tipping the scale at 290 pounds, her hubby leaves her for another chubby lady. Now divorced, the 39 year-old finds solace in her successful Chicago restaurant serving healthy gourmet fare. She has a small support group there consisting of her energetic, gay sous chef, Kai, a ballsy part-time cook, Delia, and her new roomie, a 24-year-old whimsical vagabond named Nadia. As Melanie slowly sweeps up the crumbs of fallen love, she finds Nathan and the handsome documentary filmmaker helps her overcome her body image issues. Ballis's (The Spinster Sisters) use of the enjoyment of cooking and eating as a continuous theme with featured recipes in the back is a nice addition, but the heart of her book lies within the jagged mind of Melanie and her daily struggle that most women, fat or thin, endure. Women will savor the brutal honesty of how Melanie sees her body, her battles with food, her failed marriage, and her fear of new love. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Stacey Ballis and her novels
 
“With the perfect blend of humor and heart, Ballis’s writing is powerfully honest and genuinely hilarious.”—Jen Lancaster, New York Times bestselling author of By the Numbers
 
“Her storytelling will have you alternately turning pages and calling your friends urging them to come along for the ride.”—Elizabeth Flock, New York Times bestselling author of What Happened to My Sister
 
“Smart, sexy, and delightfully buoyant…Scrumptious.”—Quinn Cummings, author of The Year of Learning Dangerously
 
“A sparkling, heartwarming novel with all the elements of a can’t-put-it-down read—a heroine you’ll root for, unexpected plot twists, and dangerously good descriptions of food!”—Sarah Pekkanen, author of Things You Won’t Say
 
“Insightful and hilarious.”—Today’s Chicago Woman

From the Publisher

Ballis captures an overeater's complicated relationship with food: Loving descriptions of dinner parties are interspersed with Melanie's memories of her cherished Easy Bake oven and paeans to mashed potatoes and macaroni and cheese.
—The Washington Post

Yvonne Zipp