A Taste For It

Cover Story

A trip to Ireland to promote Australian food and wine - Maura Carmody can't wait to get going.

A week promoting wine then three weeks as guest chef in a top cooking school - she's confident she can put Lorikeet Hill, her South Australian restaurant-winery, on the map.

The wine's been shipped, the menus tested - everything has been planned to the last detail but Maura has not planned for the whirlwind of mishaps, misunderstandings, ex-boyfriends and new rivals that awaits her in Ireland.

And she's forgotten to cater for love. And with love, like wine, you can't always predict a vintage year.

We Say

A Taste For It was the runner up in the Poolbeg-Ireland on Sunday 'Write a Bestseller' competition, won incidentally by Deborah Wright's Olivia's Bliss. We were interested in seeing how good the 'nearly made it' novel was.

The setting is good. The lead character, Maura Carmody, is innocently likeable. Even the basic storyline has a general 'feel good' nature to it. So why is A Taste For It one of the most amateurish books we've seen in quite some time? In short, it's one of the most predictable reads we've ever come across. By the end of A Taste For It's opening chapter, you'll have already encountered one scene which throws the ending at you in the opening lines. And A Taste For It is simply littered with similar moments.

All this is a shame, because the outline of the story is good and there's a decent pace to the whole thing. It's just too utterly predictable. Maura finds herself reluctantly working with a colleague who she doesn't particularly like (but, guess what - she sort of fancies him) and can we ever forgive a novel that slumps to the depths of Maura and the disliked-colleague booking into a hotel and - horrors alive - the twin-room has been mistakenly booked as a single room?

Not good. Considering that A Taste For It came second in the 'Write a Bestseller' competition, we dread to think what came third.

Review by: Rob Cook