A Comfort Stories
From the award-winning author of Comfort Plans and Comfort Songs comes a story of two rising stars blitzed by social media. Lacy Cavanaugh and single-dad Rudy Delgardo live a hundred miles apart but meet in the worst possible way. Working at a weekly paper and creating social media for area businesses helps Lacy connect with locals who open her mind to a perspective beyond Instagram. In launching a food-and-wine festival to support Comfort’s new event center, she discovers surprising skills bubbling over, much like the food she’s attempting to cook.
Rudy, on the brink of his restaurant’s takeover, struggles to improve time management so he can create a better relationship with his daughter. Distracted by Lacy and her invitation to the festival, he’s tempted by her beauty, wit, and courage, but as a chef, he rarely gets to enjoy life outside the kitchen. Enemies, illness, and exes add unwelcome spice to the dish they’re concocting—one that will teeter with misunderstanding until the very end.
Will Lacy and Rudy embrace their second chances and discover the perfect seasonings of family, resilience, and grace to create a handwritten recipe of love that will stand the test of time?
When this book crossed my desk I said yes because the author’s name rang a bell in my mind. After reading that this was the third book in a series, I assumed (wrongly) that I must have read one of the others. After searching my kindle and nook to no avail, I walked over to my shelves of ‘to be read’ real live books and started searching. Tucked in was The Big Inch. After reading Comfort Foods, The Big Inch has been moved to the head of the pile.
This book starts out with a cozy feel. Small town angst, great characters, interesting subplots and those small details that always lead to a great read. However the mystery here is not a “who done it” but more of a “will they?” Starting with the main character, Lacy, at her very bottom, I was quickly pulled in to riding her coattails as she tries to climb out of the mess that has become her life.
Living close to the edge of the Hill Country I was quickly absorbed into Comfort, TX. The descriptions made it possible for me to smell the Lavendar (yeah a little of the goat farm too!) and transported me to summers of soft breezes and simple pleasures that are the façade for something more going on.
The author expertly added in Rudy, a chef, trying hard dad, and a man pulled in many directions that enters Lacy’s life just as she is getting the first glimpse of normalcy. His daughter Luna was the perfect character to give the story light and at the same time a solid base for Rudy’s life. Watch out for the other Rudy – he’s a hoot with a lot of tenacity.
I hesitate to say this is a romance as it is so much more a tale of overcoming adversity and finding joy. A story of inner strength.
This book is easily read as a stand alone (although I’m thinking why not read them all). This book contains a lot of story and I happily could have stayed in Comfort, Texas just to see where the townspeople took me next.
Author Kimberly Fish resides in Longview, Texas, and enjoys writing contemporary fiction set in the Hill Country. During the seven years she lived in San Antonio, wandering in and around Comfort, Texas, provided endless space for her imagination to develop stories of women discovering their grit. She studied the small Texas town that had seemingly dug its heels into the limestone and refused modern development and thought that was fertile ground for stories about women remodeling their lives. It made a juxtaposition of place and purpose that was hard to ignore. Plus, anything that takes intentional effort has a much higher value than the things that come easily—Comfort personifies this, and the novels remind readers that anything worth having is worth the work.
Comfort Foods is the third full-length novel in the set, Fiction from the Texas Hill Country, and follows behind the award-winning novels Comfort Plans and Comfort Songs. A novella, Emeralds Mark the Spot, is available as a free eBook download to subscribers of the incredibly sporadic newsletter at kimberlyfish.com and is the original story from which all other Comfort novels grew.
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Jennie Reads 
I can’t wait to read this book! Great review — and YES to The Big Inch! I love this series and really hope she goes back to it and writes a 3rd book.
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Great review. I’m about to finish reading the book to do my review, and like you, I’ve found so much to enjoy about the story. And I’ll have to check out The Big Inch.
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