The Restaurant – Book Review

Hey all! I am back with a book review. Just finished reading The Restaurant by Pamela Kelley and I am going to share my thoughts with you all.

Three sisters. An inherited Nantucket restaurant. One year before they can sell.

Mandy, Emma and Jill are as close as three sisters who live hundreds of miles apart can be. They grew up together on Nantucket, but Mandy is the only one that stayed.

Jill lives a glamorous life in Manhattan as a co-owner of a successful executive search firm. Never married, she is in her mid-thirties and lives in a stunning, corner condo with breathtaking views of the city and Hudson river. Everyone thinks there’s something going on with her partner, Nick, because as a workaholic, she spends more time with him than anyone else. But there’s never been anything but friendship between them and Nick loves being a bachelor in NYC.

Emma lives in Arizona and is an elementary school teacher and an aspiring photographer. She met her college professor husband, Peter, in grad school and they’ve been married for over fifteen years. In recent years, she’s noticed that Peter has grown distant. But when he shares a surprising secret, she doesn’t see it coming and her world is turned upside down.

Mandy followed her high school boyfriend, Cory to  Boston College, and right after graduation, they married and settled in Dover, just outside of Boston. Cory joined a successful hedge fund, while Mandy took a job at a downtown financial services firm as an administrative assistant. She quit a year later, when Blake, the first baby came. Two years later, when Brooke was born, Cory left to open a competing Hedge Fund and they moved home to Nantucket.  Now that the children are older,  Mandy has more free time and is eager to do more than just volunteer with local charity events. But Cory doesn’t want her to work. He thinks it doesn’t reflect well on him and appearances are everything to Cory. Though when Mandy finds a second cell phone in his gym bag, she begins to question what is really going on.

When their beloved grandmother, Ethel Ferguson passes peacefully in her sleep a week before her ninety-ninth birthday she leaves them quite a surprise. In addition to her Nantucket home, they learned that she was the silent owner of Mimi’s Place, one of Nantucket’s most popular year-round restaurants.  

There was of course, a catch–she left the restaurant equally to Mandy, Emma, and Jill–and also to Paul, the chef for the past fifteen years. 

And before they could sell, all three girls needed to work at the restaurant for a period of one year–or else the entire restaurant would go to Paul.

The same Paul that broke Emma’s heart many years ago.

Pages :- 282 pahes

Date Published:- May 2020

Genre:- Family Saga/ Women’s Fiction

Pamela M. Kelley is a USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of women’s fiction, family sagas, and suspense. Readers often describe her books as feel-good reads with people you’d want as friends.

She lives in a historic seaside town near Cape Cod and just south of Boston. She has always been an avid reader of women’s fiction, romance, mysteries, thrillers and cook books. There’s also a good chance you might get hungry when you read her books as she is a foodie, and occasionally shares a recipe or two.

First of all I really like the cover! The cover made me want to buy the book and saw I bought the book through Kindle.

So in a nutshell, the three sisters, Jane, Mandy and Emma are living in different lives from each other. Jane has her own company in Manhattan and is very successful in her career and she questions about her budding friendship with Billy who had been her partner in the business. Emma is overcoming with heartbreak after her husband Peter cheats on her. She moves back to Nantucket from Scottsdale, Arizona. Mandy was the only one who remained in Nantucket, seemingly have a successful marriage with her college sweetheart Cory and are blessed with two children Brooke and Blake. Then one day, the girls’ grandmother dies and the sisters reunite together and discover that a popular Italian restaurant known as Mimi’s Place was actually owned by their grandmother and she had left a will of the restaurant for them. But on one condition–the three sisters need to work together with another chef Paul for one year in order for them succeed the ownership of the restaurant. But there’s one catch–Paul happened to Emma’s ex-boyfriend from high school.

So I will start with the ones I like about the book.

• I really like the bond that is shared between the three sisters–Jane, Mandy and Emma and how they support each other during their hard times.
• The first few chapters were interesting and I like the parts in the book where Mandy finds her grandmother’s diary and finds out her grandmother had acquired the restaurant. It is interesting as a reader to know the history of how the sisters’ grandmother acquired the restaurant.
• Some of the descriptions of the food written by the author was mouthwatering and wished you can actually eat it!
• The plot line was good.

Now the things I didn’t like about the book.

• I didn’t like the writing much, it was OK not that great though towards the end, it got better.
• Too much dialogue, not very interesting sometimes, got bored sometimes. It was always about meeting up, going out for food and some dialogue thing between the characters. So as a result, it was a bit boring.
• Sometimes, the food descriptions is not very appetizing and not very enjoyable
• I felt the book was being rushed a little, as if the author really wanted to finish the book early so didn’t like it much.
• It was not very realistic, very predictable because you know in the end what was going to happen and as I said, a bit boring.

Overall, this is a good book, not a great book but an OK book, worth three stars in my opinion!