Nicky Pellegrino: Delicious and Sue Emms: Parrot Parfait

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

What a pleasure to read two really good, light local romances - two romances about cafes and food, as it happens.

Romance is a "what you see is what you get" kind of writing - that is, there's not a lot of subtext going on and we can simply sit back and enjoy it (or not, as is often the case) on its own terms.

Both these novels offer the new heroine: no insipid 20-somethings here, but feisty 30-somethings with layered histories, independent means and talents and plenty of sexual experience (once alerted, they thrum with sexuality - not a hangup to be seen). They're fulfilled, in other words, and yet not fulfilled. Romance is all about answering the vulnerability that even such extraordinary women inevitably have.

The pairing of romance with food is a glorious cliche, and both authors acknowledge this in their own ways. Emms satirises it so delightfully that it's the foundation of her novel: not only does her heroine's cafe burn down, but each chapter begins with a parrot recipe which can be corny or cruel, depending on what's happening in the narrative.

For instance, this method for Sweet, Crispy Parrot: "First wash the parrots and carefully blow-dry. Hold a parrot by its feet, and dip head-first into the uncooked meringue. Stand bird on the lowest rung of a baking rack, and bake in a cool, slow oven." (This is one of the corny ones.)

Her story's heroine is successful cafe owner Paula Mason who, as we meet her, is experiencing the time-honoured trio of bad luck: finds lover in bed with "other chick", business burns down, gets hit by truck. But, as her mother would say, "every cloud has a silver lining" and as she lies trapped in her car, awaiting the jaws of life, she encounters The One. But, my goodness, she's horrible to him, and if he weren't such a saint he'd leave her there and then.

Paula is horrible to him because she has an unresolved issue lying like a black hole at the centre of her life: the probable suicide of her brother Mark and Paula feels responsible for his death. Her guilt gets in the way of all her personal relationships - the creature she feels closest to is her parrot Pete - and it must be resolved before romance can take its true path.

Emms is a keen observer of people and their emotional highways and byways and has a sure touch with comedy, as well as with the more serious, sad side of life. Her story buzzes along, weaving back and forth in time, and switching voices from third to first person.

Pellegrino also makes her story come alive with her sharply drawn characters and deft evocations of places and eras. Her project is the more ambitious in scope, although structurally it's simpler. It follows a chronological path, opening in 1964 in a little town in the south of Italy, moving to New Brighton in 1968, then to London in 2000, and waving us goodbye, now, in New Zealand.

Maria Domenica, dutiful daughter of a rural Italian family, suddenly goes off-script (it's the 60s, after all) and abandons her mother's kitchen for a job in a local cafe. She escapes her parents' plans to marry her to the handsome but no-good Marco by running away to Rome. She returns pregnant and is forced to marry Marco anyway. Shortly after she gives birth to Chiara, she escapes again and makes a new life for herself and her daughter in England.

Around the middle of the book, the story leaps ahead to 2000 and puts Chiara, now a famous chef and author of a bestselling recipe book, at its centre. We follow her quest to discover the identity of her father, and watch as she finds her mother's relatives back in Italy, hoping she will choose the nice man, not the handsome horror.

Most of the story tells itself without self-consciousness, achieving real emotional depth. It's a delight, an easy, pleasurable read, often genuinely moving or gently funny, with characters that we love (or hate - she does a great line in handsome villains, and also creates a wicked sister par excellence) and we eagerly follow them through the years.

Maria's journey reflects, loosely, Pellegrino's own personal and family history, but I couldn't help feeling uncomfortable when the inevitable insertion of New Zealand came along, sort of tacked on the end, hanging there like a bit of thread from a hem.

William Brandt did it in The Book of the Film of the Story of my Life and there, too, it was the soggiest part of the book, as if this country is simply a literary cliche for a new beginning, a way out.

Pellegrino rescues herself by eventually validating her decision to move her main characters out here, at the end.

On the way, we have made it through some rather self-conscious, in-house stuff. The author is the deputy editor of the New Zealand Woman's Weekly and is just a bit too knowing about aspects of the Auckland media scene - she'll get some backs up, and some cheers, with her hilarious description of defensive food writers, those "brightly hued harridans". Pellegrino deftly satirises the foodie world. The food itself is romantically evoked and, apart from its sheer deliciousness, is full of predictable, comforting symbolism for the good things in life, such as family ties, friendship and a slower pace of life. But marketers and television crews run rampant around it and over it, ruthlessly manipulating it for their own ends, turning the food and the cooks into bit-players in a drama that's all about ego and money.

Those who think New Zealand writing is all doom and gloom really need to think again. These two quality light reads deserve a big audience.

Delicious. Black Swan, $26.95

Parrot Parfait. Hazard, $24.95