This is a really sweet story about family, loss, community, food and following your dreams! I admit that I had high expectations for this book, and was a little let down, but enjoyed it nevertheless. I really enjoyed how Lim explored the immigrant and Chinese American relationship, especially to the San Francisco area, as well as how important food is to their culture. I also really enjoyed the magical realism aspects of this book, as well as the inclusion of the recipes mentioned in the story! The inclusion of mental illness and the stigmas associated with it were also a pleasant surprise, but I feel like we were let down with the romance aspect, and some continuity in the story line (i.e. plane tickets, jobs, etc). This YA combination of Sourdough by Robin Sloan and the classic Joy Luck Club is still most definitely worth a read!

I enjoyed Natalie Tans Book of Luck and Fortune.

Our main character Natalie returns home seven years later after the sudden and unexpected death of her mother. Returning home leaves Natalie in a state of anxiety as she and her mom didn't have have the best relationship when she left and she also felt a way about the neighbors who still remain in the community.

What I enjoyed most about this read was the family connection that Natalie discovered through learning the recipes in her Grandmothers cookbook. The bits of magical realism throughout the story was also a great plus. Reading as Natalie cooked her grandmothers recipes (in a effort to save her gentrifying neighborhood) was wonderful.

There wasn't much to the romance aspect of Natalies Tan's as I felt it was kind of jumbled in the book to give Natalie something else to do, it felt very much rushed. I understand that falling instantly in love can be a thing but Natalie and Daniel? too fast.

All and all I still enjoyed this one. The secondary characters (Natalie's neighbors) added the extra padding I needed, seeing the completion of their stories made the read worthwhile.

If you love a family saga with a smidgen of magical realism, then Natalie Tan's Book of Luck and Fortune will be the book to pick up.

Natalie Tan is finally going home. Her mother died unexpectedly and she has to pick up the pieces. She finds she has inherited her grandmother's restaurant as well as her mother's apartment above it. She left home because she wanted to take cooking classes and her mother wanted her to go to college. Now she has an opportunity to open a restaurant and she's going to do it. But the whole street is gray and lifeless. Where did the customers go? Why are the businesses failing?

Berkley Books and Net Galley allowed me to read this book for review (Thank you). This book is being published today.

She visits with the shop owners and listens to their tales of woe. Then she's given her grandmother's cookbook. Not only does it have good recipes, it has suggestions for what it will fix. Eat one dish and develop courage. Eat another and renew love in a relationship. She starts feeding the neighbors. It works for a while but then one falls and breaks his leg, the couple starts arguing again and it looks like it was all for naught. There is a very aggressive realtor trying to talk them into selling.

Natalie also finds a new love interest. She's still trying to hold the neighborhood together. And then her restaurant catches fire and burns...

She talks about walking away from the mess and her boyfriend knows that will mean leaving him, so he goes. You will be amazed about who steps in to help. Now can she get her love back?

I enjoyed the read. It has history, romance, and some crotchety old people in it. What more could you want?

I ENJOYED…
☂️

- Natalie Tan’s Book of Luck and Fortune warmed my heart SO much overall, it was such a wonderful debut that was a delight to read, had me smiling, had my heart aching and made me very happy, too, overall.
- At the heart of the story, we have Natalie, coming back home after her mother’s death, re-discovering the Chinatown she knew slowly fading, re-discovering her community, her neighbors and so on. She was a great main character, driven by her own dream, grappling with her family’s past, doing her very best, sometimes stumbling and making mistakes, I really loved her a lot.
- The relationships between the characters were so, so great to follow and I think that’s what I loved the most about it all. If there is romance (more on that later), the book follows even more deeply the relationships within Chinatown and the community, the way they have each other’s back, help each other, gain trust in each other again and so on. This made me so, so happy and warmed my heart and, when complications came I wanted them all to be okay again. I adored that.
- There was a little bit of romance there to make you swoon, but I appreciated that it didn’t take over the entire story, either. The love interest was really, really sweet and supportive and all I’m asking for, really, yet his presence and the slow-starting romance didn’t take over everything.
- This book made me VERY HUNGRY. Natalie is a fantastic chef and, as you read on, you get to read all about her family’s recipes, how she cooks, how the food melts in your mouth, Chinese, Vietnamian, Filipino dishes and so many others, too and ahh I’m very hungry okay.
- From family to food to community, to mental illness and more, I loved how immersed I felt into these lives and this Chinatown community that felt like family. I loved it.


I HAD A HARD TIME WITH…
☂️

- I felt a little confused while reading at times because I didn’t expect the magical realism parts of the book, at all, I had no idea there was magical realism in this story and, when I first read some passages, I felt.. well, really confused.
- I didn’t really have a hard time with this overall, and even if I put it in the positives of this review, too, I just want to talk for a second about the romance. I appreciated Daniel a whole lot, but I feel like the romance wasn’t entirely necessary to the story as a whole. You know me, I love a good romance overall, but here, in this particular story, I feel like it wasn’t entirely necessary.

OVERALL
☂️
If you’re looking for a fun, endearing, heartwarming read that will make you very hungry, I’d 200% recommend Natalie Tan’s Book Of Luck and Fortune!

I think I set myself up for disappointment with Natalie Tan’s Book of Luck & Fortune. I expected an epic Like Water for Chocolate meets The Joy Luck Club tale. What I got was a cute story, but one that failed to hold my interest.

If you read the synopsis, you pretty much know the entire first half of the book. Nothing substantial is added to the plot and the characters are not particularly developed. The second half of the book is perhaps a bit stronger, but I never felt truly invested in Natalie or her neighbors.

The story relies heavily on the reader’s willingness to believe in magic. The whimsical premise makes that possible. Natalie shines whenever she is cooking, and she delights in seeing the wonderful reactions of those who eat her food. It’s sweet, but I grew bored.

The blurb mentions Natalie’s budding romance; however, there really isn’t much romance. She has a potential boyfriend that she only sees a handful of times, and their interactions are superficial at best.

Ultimately, the author’s style just didn’t suit me. The writing is over-saturated with similes and metaphors, particularly in the first half of the book. Rather than enhancing the story, I found the literary devices to be distracting. The choppy dialogue also gives the storyline a disjointed feel.

Perhaps if I had adjusted my expectations I would have enjoyed the book more; sadly, it fell short.

If you’re looking for a summer beach read, I highly recommend Natalie Tan’s Book of Love and Fortune. It’s got a little bit of everything. Second chances, a love story, working through family dysfunction, food and recipes, social commentary, and a little bit of mysticism.
Natalie Tan returns to her hometown in Chinatown after her mother’s unexpected death. She’s always wanted to be a chef but life had other plans for her. Plans that involved her running far from her home and her mother.
Yet she returns as the dutiful daughter and decides she will finally open up the restaurant her grandmother started. Finding the book of recipes her grandmother created, she tries to assuage with food the conflict brewing among her mother’s friends and neighbors. Each recipe acting as a recipe to help support the issue or pain point of her neighbors and friends. All in all, she knows deep down her grandmother’s recipes will heal the community.
However, as good of intention as she hopes, the following result is not always what she wishes it would be. Sometimes, the effect of the food makes her feel as if she made things worse. Until she realizes it’s not necessarily what’s in a book, but what’s inside her.
Natalie Tan’s Book of Love and Fortune is a book of exploration and what it means to be family. Of what it means to support friends. Taking risks in love and life and having the courage to succeed. Often times, it’s finding what is buried within us and allowing that light to shine. And our Natalie eventually does that, with some help along the way.
Bonus, Roselle Lim provides full recipes throughout the book, and I for one am eager to try. Finally, we receive a glimpse of what life is like in a traditional and multi-generational Chinese community.

*An ARC of this book was provided to me by NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.*

This is a lovely, heartwarming story about family, community, and following your dreams, with a little dash of romance thrown in. I loved reading the recipes and imagining the amazing food Natalie was preparing for her neighbors. It also portrayed loss and grief in a very realistic and thoughtful way, which I appreciated. The touches of magic were charming and fit in nicely with the whimsical storyline. This book made me smile and made me hungry!

<b>Actual rating:</b> <i>2.5 stars</i>

Well, I seriously need to stop putting expectations on books because when it doesn’t live up to them, I feel a bit let down. That again is the case with this book. I’m not saying it was wholly bad because it definitely wasn’t, but there are some things that simply didn’t work for me.

A huge thanks to Berkley Books and NetGalley for providing a free digital copy in exchange for an honest review.

It’s a struggle to put my thoughts into words about this book. On one hand, I really loved how it explored Chinese-American culture and what that meant for our main character, Natalie. On the other hand, there were few things compelling me read this book. I liked the concept of the book, but I thought it was poorly executed. Estranged daughter returns after the death of her mother and suddenly feels so much regret and continually speaks about how much she misses her mother. In my head, I kept thinking, Where was all this when the two of you were apart? I can’t blame Natalie though. I can’t imagine what it was like growing up in this way, but Natalie’s resentment really burned a hole in the mother/daughter relationship. Look, I don’t expect things to be peachy keen and yes, I did appreciate how Natalie eventually came to understand her mother in a way she wouldn’t have had her mother’s death not happened. But I think I expected this book to mainly be about Natalie’s growing restaurant, but it wasn’t that, not really. It became more personal than just a restaurant for Natalie, and she saw with her own eyes how alone her mother wasn’t, which causes her to feel conflicted.

The story also had a magical realism element to it which I really enjoyed. At first I had to reread a couple of passages to make sure it wasn’t really Natalie’s imagination but something concrete. I liked how the food she made came into play here, and was really able to affect the mood of the people around her.

It also tackled some stigma around mental illness and how Natalie’s culture in particular has a hard time accepting or even seeing this.

I really liked all the characters here, though I felt we were shorted in the developing romance between Natalie and another character. I wasn’t fully convinced of their romance, and it was a bit frustrating at times. I liked the closeness of Natalie and her mother’s friend, Celia. I think I want to be Celia when I get older, lol. The cast of characters really allowed the story and the neighborhood to come to life, especially in terms of how much Natalie did yet did not want to help them. They each had a story to tell and to see how Natalie came to care about them was quite enduring and a true homage to her neighborhood and culture. The surprise in the end was just that: a surprise and I really liked it and how it brought a bit of closure and reduced some of Natalie’s bitterness.

I struggled with the writing style. Despite the amazing and mouth-watering food descriptions and how much this book centered around food and its properties, it simply felt a little disjointed and the dialogue stilted and didn’t seem to flow well. I can’t place my figure exactly on why I feel this way, but it definitely was a deterrent, not allowing me to fully enjoy this book. This doesn’t turn me off from the author completely, but it does make me a little bit wary.

Natalie Tan’s Book of Luck and Fortune is a about Natalie, a young woman who returns home after her estranged mother dies and attempts to reopen her late grandmother’s shuttered restaurant below their apartment. I love the close-knit community in San Francisco’s Chinatown that Lim paints, and I especially loved how Natalie’s cooking process is described. She makes both Chinese and Filipino dishes, which really spoke to me, as I grew up eating the Filipino dishes. I This book also had an element of magical realism that was at first, completely lost on me. The first time it was used, I was terribly confused. It had nothing to do with food, but about crying tears of crystal. It completely threw me off, and it didn’t really add anything to the story. I think the writing would have been a little more cohesive if the magical realism strictly pertained to food.

I liked the family traditions and touches of magic in this book. The story of gentrification of China town in San Francisco and members of the community trying to fight it was well done and interesting.

This was lovely, with beautiful, heartfelt descriptions of places, people, and food. There's this little bit of magic described, and if you believe in the healing and power of sharing food you've made with others, it will resonate and warm you. It's the kind of story where the characters and setting are so well done that readers can picture them perfectly- and the recipes and descriptions of food will make you hungry!

This was such a lovely and feel-good read, and I was happy to be part of Natalie's journey as she found her way back to her roots and herself. There were so many things to praise in this book, and here are five things I loved about Natalie Tan's Book of Luck & Fortune.

1. The Food! - I am warning you right now - do NOT read this book on an empty stomach. Lim's love of cooking and culinary delights shines on these pages. She engaged all my senses with her vivid descriptions and full recipes. She included many dishes I have had the pleasure of tasting and even more I hope to taste.

2. The Community - Natalie's family was lucky to have landed in this neighborhood, because it was filled with so many wonderful and caring people. It was a delight getting to know all the denizens of this street, and it was beautiful the way they all bonded together to help first, Natalie's mother, and then, Natalie herself. I got some serious warm-fuzzies being around this bunch.

3. The Tan Women - Learning about Natalie's mother and grandmother gave me hope for her. She was the product of such strong women, and I knew she would find her inner strength to get through this situation, because she had such stellar role models, who had overcome adversity.

4. Chinese Culture - Lim did such a fantastic job weaving the cultural aspects into the story, and I really enjoyed learning more about Chinese customs and traditions.

5. Natalie's Personal Journey - Natalie had been untethered for quite some time, and she struggled with making permanent connections. It was wonderful seeing her find herself by digging into her history and also, uncovering some family secrets. With each additional bit she learned, I saw her eyes and her heart opening wider and wider, and the end result was stellar.

Overall, this was a heartwarming tale of love, loss, family, community, and food served up with lots of heart and a dash of magic.

Natalie Tan had no desire of going home to San Francisco's Chinatown, but with her agoraphobic mother's unexpected death, Natalie returns—and learns that she had inherited her grandmother's long-abandoned restaurant. Reluctant to engage in the community Natalie believed had forsaken her mother, she finally decides to pursue her own dream of owning a restaurant...despite flunking culinary school and having miles of doubts. But first, she has to heal her community, and only three recipes from her grandmother's book can fix it...

This book was nothing like what I had expected.

Perhaps that's why I didn't enjoy it as much as I wanted, because this was one of my most anticipated reads of June. The blurb—and that adorably fun cover—promised hilarity, fun, community and lots of food.

It does have a lot of food (so read on a full stomach, you have been warned) and a sense of community, but it doesn't have any of the fun and hilarity because this is not a rom-com/chicklit book, despite that cover and the cues in the summary.

This book is filled with magical realism. As for genre—it kinda waffles in between several, before settling on contemporary magical realism? It's not chick lit, I wouldn't reeeeeeaally call it romance (it is brief), and the magical realism makes it less contemporary than anything else. But at times it felt like chick lit, then romance, then contemporary, then family story, then who knows what else. Like Natalie, the book felt like it struggled to figure out its own identity.

While I absolutely loved the overall story—a young woman returning to the place of her childhood, realizing her neighbors weren't as awful as she remembered, and regaining a community she had lost—I wasn't a huge fan of the writing style.

It's very much a book written towards white people (of which I am one), with Natalie constantly explaining things about her culture—sometimes over and over, and often with the phrase "in my culture," to the point where you wonder who her audience is. We learn about the importance of the number eight probably five times over the course of the book, along with several other details. I really didn't need to have the concept of filial piety explained three times in fairly extensive detail. Once was enough.

This repetition continues with Natalie's family history and with factoids about her mother and grandmother. I wouldn't have minded it so much, but each time a piece of history was repeated, it was presented like this was the first time I was reading it—often written in a sentence that was remarkably similar to the one before. It made the book feel poorly edited, with parts copied and pasted in to fill in the gaps and make it longer. Combined with a lot of telling—Natalie is constantly interrupting her narrative to tell us about her mother and her feelings—the writing felt flat and filled with exposition.

I did enjoy the interactions with her neighbors. They were one-dimensional, but served the purpose of the storyline and captured the feel of the book's at times fairy tale nature.

I was not, however, particularly sold with the romance, which felt very rushed (although I enjoyed the imagery of Natalie basically bursting into flames with lust as Daniel ate *fans self*), as Natalie had basically decided Daniel was The One after he'd eaten in her restaurant twice. The dude loved her cooking and her body but didn't even know her name. Like, they went on one walk and a date, and that was it.

Love 4eva, chemistry between the two not necessary.

Coupled with all of the other competing storylines and interests—returning to your culture, becoming an entrepreneur, reconnecting to your past, forming friendships among community, forgiveness, etc—the romance aspect got lost in the shuffle and felt shoe-horned into the storyline so that it could be marketed as a romance book.

The final thing I'm going to talk about is the magical realism. There is a lot of magic going on in this book—between Natalie's solid tears, her fogging up the world with her horniness, literal sparks flying with her neighbors, the goddess statue, the birds, the sidewalk cracks, etc.—but I could never really tell if it was all in Natalie's head or if the other characters saw it too.

Because no one ever said, "Holy shit, did you see that spark come out of the phone and wrap itself about my wrist?! That was scary!"

I mean, that would be my reaction.

Because it's clear that certain characters can see the effects of Natalie's magic—Celia and Old Wu, for instance—but it's just...there? It's not remarked upon, like these incredibly fantastic occurrences are so mundane and routine (despite not having seen magic for thirty years) that they're just not going to say anything at all.

But this is a me problem, and entirely why I don't particularly like magical realism books or horror movies where the characters don't react normally to completely batshit bonkers situations. And I will admit, that the normally bland exposition turned downright poetic when there was magic happening—it wrapped me right into the story.

Wrapping up this long review—I did like the food descriptions. Holy hell everything sounded so delicious and amazing, and I wanted to eat everything then and there.

I also liked that Natalie faced so many difficulties in opening up the restaurant, and that the gentrification and whitefication of Chinatown was mentioned, along with how the tech boom had dramatically altered San Francisco's real estate prices and how Chinese families who lived in their buildings for generations were being driven out due to low demand, high prices and new businesses stealing the soul from their streets.

I did appreciate this story, and the cultural representation of a Chinese-American chef coming home after bucking cultural expectations. I just wished that I had enjoyed it more than I did.

However—my experience will probably differ from yours. This book has a lot of charm, but it wasn't really something that resonated with me, mostly due to my dislike of the narrative style and magical realism (seriously, I need real-people reactions to ridiculous shit—or at least someone going, "holy hell what was that?!" and another character just shrugging and saying, "oh yeah, weird things happen around the Tan women—don't worry about it").

I received this ARC from NetGalley for an honest review.

This book will make you hungry!

Thank you, Netgalley, for this arc! This book was a delight to read. I loved the descriptions of all of Natalie's dishes, and I appreciated the small dashes of magic. I would have liked to see more action - it seemed that all that happened in this book was a whole lot of cooking and eating - but even so I thought this book was a gem and that this new author holds a lot of promise.

The idea of exploring the world beyond the dragon gate of San Francisco’s Chinatown through a heartwarming story of loss, love, and a dying neighborhood’s hope seemed like just the thing. I read this book knowing it was a debut novel and shook my head with surprise because it felt rich in background, setting, situation, and characters in a way that one doesn’t normally experience in a first book.

Natalie has been kicking about around the world for the last seven years carrying around hurt pride that she failed culinary school and never had her mother’s approval to be a chef and have her own restaurant, bitterness over the abandonment of her father before she was even born and leaving her to look after a mother with agoraphobia. But, the call comes from back in her old San Francisco Chinatown neighborhood that tells her that she waited too long to resolve the gulf between her and her mother. Those words spoken in anger will remain her last to her dead mother.

Natalie arrives home to find a dying neighborhood of shops, people who claim to have been her mother’s friends and wish to grieve with her and the legacy of her grandmother’s restaurant below the apartment she shared with her mother. A fortunetelling reveals that she must help the neighbors for her dream of reopening her grandmother’s restaurant to be successful. Natalie’s great at running when life gets tough and now she has come full circle and must stick to it for once.

The set up for this one grabbed my emotions from the outset. Natalie is at a low point when the book begins and now she must face her old home where memories of her life with her mother and their family break up occurred, her childhood resentment when she thought neighbors left them on their own, her fear that she’s not good enough to open her courageous grandmother’s restaurant and serve her dishes, and that her issues with her father’s abandonment clouding her ability to stay with a relationship long.

The book seems to flow along at a gentle pace with daily events and a seemingly easy time for Natalie to go about restoring and righting things. Of course, she hit a snag and it tore through all the good track she had laid down and that was when it got interesting. A little mystery and drama entered the picture and shook things up a bit.

I appreciated how the author handled Miranda’s agoraphobia and how Natalie perceived her mother’s illness. I like seeing characters who struggle with such disorders and illness portrayed with complexity and not just labeled by their illness.

There was magic in the recipes and magic in how the neighborhood’s good fortune was directly tied to the state of her grandmother’s restaurant. There is also a mystery in how to make it all work out because something is missing and Natalie has to find out what even while she is engaging in a sweet side romance.

This one is definitely for lovers of culture, close-knit friends and family, and food- yes the food. Recipes are sprinkled throughout this book and I was left salivating as the descriptions of cooking and results were written so well.

The writing style was both lavish on description and a feast for the senses in beautiful prose without losing an easy comfortable feeling.

All in all, it was a lovely uplifting story of restoration, a bit of magic and the work it takes to feed good relationships and dreams. I can definitely recommend this one for those looking for a great summer read.

Natalie Tan’s Book of Luck and Fortune will make you laugh, cry, and heading to your local market for everything you need for your favorite dumplings recipe. A heartfelt story that will give you all the mother/daughter feels.

Book Review: Natalie Tan's Book of Luck and Fortune by Roselle Lim

This is a magical tale filled with healing, second chances, tons of food, lots of traditions & a dash of romance.

Returning Home 

Years ago, Natalie Tan says goodbye to her home in San Francisco's Chinatown. In spite of her agoraphobic mother, she leaves & travels the world. Throughout her travels, she tastes & savors different cuisines. Food is her calling & she becomes a chef. 

Suddenly, her mother dies & she must return home to settle the estate. While home, she is thrust into her neighborhood with judgmental neighbors & plenty of frenemies. When news comes she may be able to sell the home, she stalls. When a friend steps in, Natalie is able to challenge her belief system. She begins to see her neighborhood & neighbors with a fresh set of eyes.

Food is Love

Food is such an integral part of Natalie Tan's Book of Luck and Fortune. Armed with her Grandmother's famous recipes, Natalie dives into the kitchen. While creating meals for her neighbors, she is able to help them heal & grow. By returning home and returning to her family recipes, Natalie is able to rediscover her self and what family means to her.

One thing I love & didn't expect is how big of a role mental health plays in Natalie Tan's Book of Luck and Fortune. Growing up, Natalie didn't have the necessary skills to help her agoraphobic & mentally ill mother. Roselle Lim really shines here as she brings up the stigma often associated with mental health. We see the role mental health plays within the three generations of Tan women.

THE VERDICT

I am Really Into This book! Natalie Tan's Book of Luck and Fortune is a wonderful story about family, food & healing. Roselle Lim's writing really warms my heart. I'm writing this review about a week after finishing the book. Thinking about it now, the tale makes me smile. Read this if you're looking for something uplifting & unique with a little bit of magic. 

Special thanks to Roselle Lim, Berkley & NetGalley for providing my copy in exchange for an honest & fair review.

Natalie Tan's Book of Luck and Fortune was a magical little story about family, community, good food, and mental health. I enjoyed it for the most part, especially the descriptions of the food and the recipes! I don't read a lot of adult contemporary, but I think this is a really unique story (and it's OwnVoices).

The writing and plot in this book was good, but it did read like a debut. Some of the pacing was off, and some aspects of the plot felt rushed. I started falling off the wagon at about 80% and would have liked a bit more expansion into what was happening. Natalie had potential to be an amazing character, but with the big things happening to her at the end, the author could have dived deeper into her feelings and the consequences.

Overall, this was a charming story and if you are looking for something involving the importance of good neighbors and food, then this is for you.

From the moment I heard of Natalie Tan's Book of Luck and Fortune, I KNEW I had to read it. Set in San Francisco, centered around food, with a dash of magical realism? Yes, please! Then the cover was released and was (and is!) absolutely adorable, and once I saw it on NetGalley I hit that "request" button SO FAST. Though not slated for release until June, I eagerly started the book in February and found it to be a heartwarming story perfect for the dreary winter weather.

The novel follows Natalie, an almost thirty year old who returns to her home town in San Francisco after her mother's death. Her mother's dead hits her especially hard as she hasn't spoken to her mother in several years after a falling out and now must pick up the pieces of her old life and come to terms with community that she fled from all of those years ago in order to pursue her dream of becoming a chef. At first, Natalie is bitter, assuming her neighbors were selfish and unhelpful, ignoring her mother's agoraphobia (causing her to be too scared to ever leave her apartment) and leaving her and her mother to fend for themselves for decades. Yet as she goes through the process of burying her mother and deciding what to do with her family's abandoned restaurant, she realizes that she too is complicit in her strained relationship with both her mother and her community. After discovering her grandmother's old recipe book, Natalie attempts to heal many of the anxieties and wounds facing the community through cooking.

There's many things that this novel does exceptionally well. It explores and explains Natalie's Chinese heritage and customs, and touches upon the immigrant experience in San Francisco and the looming issue of gentrification that Chinatown faces in modern times. It juxtaposes the desires of different generations and what the "American Dream" means to each woman in the Tan family. It weaves in threads and hints of magic that are just subtle enough to be believed as real, such as Natalie collecting tears, visible manifestations of emotion that appear in golden threads, fireworks, and other symbols when people eat, and a magical cookbook that contains recipes not just to satisfy the stomach but the soul as well. I loved the way magic was tied in with spirituality in this story as well, and how Natalie was able to honor her family through both rituals and dreams and communicate with them on a level outside of just the physical- there's a slight supernatural layer to the story that never feels out of place, but rather enhances the emotions and relationships that are presented.

While I loved meeting the cast of neighborhood characters and admiring Natalie's mouthwatering concoctions (there are even recipes included, straight from her grandmother's cookbook!) there were a few elements of the novel that felt underdeveloped to me. Natalie's main passion in life is cooking and it's so deeply rooted in her family history and personal narrative, yet sometimes it had to compete with a random love of music that would pop up. The connection to between her and music receives some clarity toward the end of the book, and of course people can have multiple interests and hobbies, however it did feel like the cooking and musical elements were competing for screen time and her interest in music didn't feel very authentic aside from her telling the reader how much she enjoyed listening to different instruments and soundtracks. There was also a romance side plot, which I wasn't surprised by, but it felt underdeveloped and either needed more page time or could have been cut entirely (which would have been fine, considering there's so many other important non-romanctic relationships featured in this story).

Overall: Natalie Tan's Book of Luck and Fortune is a heart and stomach warming story that combines the healing power of food with the importance of family and community. I felt happy and content upon finishing it and will definitely be checking out future books by this debut author!

I wanted to like this book so much more than I did! I honestly thought I was going to love it! Based on the cover alone (lol), but also because of its strong focus on food and cooking and family. But despite the fact that Roselle Lim's writing is absolutely gorgeous, I just couldn't get into the plot of this book.

I truly believe food as the power to heal and so I loved that that was a focus of this book. When Natalie's estranged mother dies, Natalie moves back to San Francisco for the funeral and decides to stay and re-open the restaurant her grandmother once ran. Her grandmother left behind a book filled with her recipes with descriptions of the powers they hold (i.e. some foods bring comfort, some love, some courage, etc.). The problem for me was that the book was more "fantasy" in this way. The food she makes doesn't heal in a subtle way; it heals in a "one minute you hate your spouse and the next minute you're madly in love," which just felt so unrealistic to me. Perhaps I just went into the book with the wrong idea of it and wasn't expecting so much legit magic and thought it would be more realistic.

The book also felt like it needed a heavier handed edit. Like I said, Lim is a truly talented writer and her prose is beautiful. She also writes great characters and clearly knows how to build a story. But everything put together needed a little "sprucing" up and as someone who's worked in editorial positions before, this was so immediately clear to me. Parts of the story were underdeveloped, especially Natalie's "relationship" with Daniel. It felt so rushed and I was weirded out by how Natalie was talking about him after meeting once. Also, the fact that Natalie's mom had journals with so much literally spelled out felt like a total cop out to me. Not only was this an easy way to tie up some loose ends, but even the way they were written felt a bit fake to me.

Clearly, there were many things in this book that really bugged me. But I really would read another book from Lim and think she has so much potential. Also, she is wonderful at writing descriptions of food and I want to make so many of the recipes in the book! And obviously that book cover belongs in a frame.