Dinner at Mine

by Chris Smyth

[Leah]

When I heard about Dinner At Mine by Chris Smyth, I was really excited to read the novel. I love Come Dine With Me – it’s one of my guilty pleasures, and I love books about food. Mostly because I love food, although my kind of food (as I mentioned in my The Secret Supper Club review) is more fish fingers than octopus. So when I was browsing on Amazon, Dinner At Mine finally found its way into my basket, and it was my first choice read as soon as it arrived, and I wasn’t disappointed in the novel at all.

If you didn’t already know, Dinner At Mine is a book version of Come Dine With Me, where four couples take it in turns to host a dinner party and where after each meal, each couple is marked out of ten for their efforts. It started as an innocent little game, but soon turns into a fully blown competition as each host tries to out-do the other. There’s Rosie and Stephen, Marcus and Sarah, Justin and Barbara and Matt and Charlotte, and as the weeks pass and the barbed comments fly, the tension becomes palpable and it’s not just the food being judged as the guests begin to attack each other about their principles and beliefs, and relationships start to crumble left, right and center.

I thought Dinner At Mine was a fascinating read. I loved the four couples and the arguing between them, veering between egging on Charlotte against Justin, and then feeling quite sorry for Justin when they all gang up on him a bit; wondering what was going to occur between Matt and Charlotte, if anything; and I was massively curious by the annoying enigma that was Marcus, hereby titled the most annoying person you could ever wish to invite to a dinner party. He criticised everything, and it set the tone for the novel, as the guests decided that the only way forward was to attack, attack, attack. It was great fun seeing the knives come out and the gloves come off, and it really was like reading a book version of Come Dine With Me, Smyth has parodied it perfectly.

The novel was just total and utter chaos, with each host thinking that their meal was better than everyone elses. I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel with such up-themselves people as those in Dinner At Mine. They were all so egotistical, even Justin in a way, and you just can’t imagine people being like that in real life. At least, I hope not. I wouldn’t ever want to meet them, that’s for sure. I thoroughly enjoyed the novel, though. It was exactly what I’d asked for and it was just like Come Dine With Me. Smyth’s a fantastic writer, and he had me utterly absorbed in these characters, in their lives, in them, despite how horrific they seemed as people, which is a true talent, I think. I absolutely hope he’s working on a second novel, because he has a talent for writing parodies of fabulous shows and it would be interesting if his second novel followed in this vein (especially as the possibilities are endless with so many shows able to be parodied!), and I’ll be on the look out for it, that’s for certain, and all Come Dine With Me fans will adore Dinner At Mine. It’s fab.