Sunshine Mackenzie is living the dream, she's a culinary star with millions of fans, a line of #1 bestselling cookbooks, and a devoted husband happy to support her every endeavor. And then she gets hacked. When Sunshine's secrets are revealed, her fall from grace is catastrophic. She loses the husband, her show, the fans, and her apartment. She's forced to return to the childhood home, and the estranged sister, she's tried hard to forget. But what Sunshine does amid the ashes of her own destruction may well save her life. In a world where celebrity is a careful construct, Hello, Sunshine is a compelling, funny, and evocative novel about what it means to live an authentic life in an inauthentic age.
Hello, Sunshine was one of those books where I somehow didn't end up reading the synopsis prior to reading the novel (I am not completely sure how that happens but it occasionally does!) so all I really knew was that it had something to do with a disgraced food blogger. I had NO IDEA that it was going to be the train wreck it was, and how far that disgrace would go- I literally spent like an hour and a half of the elliptical reading the first half of this book because I could not tear myself away from the downright spiral that Sunny's life became. However, once the dust settled and she was completely exposed and returned to her idyllic seaside hometown to ~find herself~, I found myself feeling like I was reading a completely different book. It went from being super fast paced and Gossip Girl-esque to being sort of slow and full of characters who were all super unlikable. So the ending was a bit of a nosedive for me but I DID enjoy reading about a so-not-perfect protagonist who doesn't constantly apologize for what she's done wrong, and I loved the hilarious, obviously based on Gordon Ramsay character she goes to work for to try and reestablish herself. There's also some interesting messaging here about how we portray ourselves online and the image we curate for social media if you care to delve a little bit deeper.
Overall: This book was a hot mess but in a highly entertaining way, as we see a true take down of the protagonist in the first half of the book. While the second half of the book was slower than I anticipated (and had considerably less food than I was hoping for), I still enjoyed reading it overall and it was a really quick read.This review was originally posted on Girl in the Pages
Reading updates
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29 November, 2017:
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29 November, 2017:
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