(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)
Can something that starts out as flirtatious and diversionary become something far more meaningful?
If you believe romantic comedies, whatever the medium, and we want to, we really want to otherwise why watch or read them as obsessively as we do, the answer is most definitively yes, but it’s doubtful they feel as fulfilling and complete as Duck à l’Orange for Breakfast by Karina May, which takes a Tinder relationship meant to stay in the digital and well away from IRL and does some particularly meaningful and healing things with it.
And honestly given how dire Maxine “Max” Mayberry life is at the start of the novel, she doesn’t just need meaningful and healing (in all senses of the word) but charming, loving, unconditionally supportive and full of dreams come true.
Being a rom-com novel with a considerable amount of emotional weight to it, Duck à l’Orange for Breakfast manages to serve all that up and more, but it’s the way this superbly paced and written novel does it that will win readers’ hearts.
For a start, Max is someone you can readily identify with, love and want to see have happiness and all the #LifeGoals in the world rain down upon her, especially since Max has a condition that warrants brain surgery, scary and distressing enough on its own but made even more so by the fact that she’s just discovered her decade-long boyfriend is having an affair with someone not necessarily dear but definitely near to her.
It’s been five years, but I still haven’t made much progress on my novel, preferring instead to make up little stories about the characters I see at IKEA. At last count, I have twenty IKEA-inspired vignettes. Scott used to laugh when I read them aloud, but I stopped doing that months before we broke up.
She’s horrified and heartbroken as you would be, but also keenly aware that something has always been a little off with Scott, and indeed his try-hard French wanna-be family who claim ancestry of France and who use a weighty collection of recipes known as The Laurent Family Cookbook as a weapon of familial acceptance that has always left Max feeling on the outer and not quite worthy of the tome.
Freed from their oddly conditional embrace, Max is able to finally see that maybe Scott wasn’t good for her, a perspective burnished and encouraged by her bestie Alice, with whom she now lives, who sees the ex as a man out for himself at the expense of Max who was only ever going to be collateral damage in his quest for stand-up comedy stardom.
But being freed from something unhealthy is one thing but the big question looms – assuming the brain surgery is a success and doesn’t leave Max changed physically or in personality, where on earth does she go next and what does she do?
The frustrated ad executive is writing a novel and spends her visits to her beloved IKEA in Tempe – the novel is set in Australia’s most populous city and makes deft use of many of its touchstones, even those imported from elsewhere – turning her observation of her fellow shoppers into pithily on-point and very funny mini character studies.
She has a gift for writing but is that enough to get her somewhere new and different?
(courtesy official Karina May Instagram account)
That is the million dollar question and the intrigue and questioning goes still deeper as a brush with Tinder membership sees her connect with the funny, sweet and clever Johnny, a man who’s only too willing to take on the “Fork Him” project with Max which involved cooking 14 recipes from the infamous family cookbook and see who does it better.
It’s all subjective, of course, since not meeting up is one of the conditions of their fun but fully virtual connection, and will have to rely on how lovely the dishes look rather than how they taste – Max is a cook on a learning curve so at times she struggles with both but ultimately grows – but this revenge-inspired, screw-you contest soon becomes something more, although Max isn’t sure where she wants to take it, just like she’s not sure about so much of her life which could yet have a startling finite span.
The joy of Duck à l’Orange for Breakfast isn’t so much about who ends up with who and when and why, although that is romantically fulfilling and charming to the nth degree, but how Max gets to a place of expected peace, love and contentment, somewhere she doesn’t expect to ever arrive at when the novel opens to her life is seemingly unfixable, mortally-imperilled and delightfully wry at times disarray.
I’m still laughing at how ridiculous I am as I head to the register. And praying that the security camera hasn’t captured embarrassing footage for a viral TikTok.
May writes with an assured hand taking her protagonist around Sydney and across the world to France, with IKEA featuring heavily as it must in all kinds of amusingly touching and inventively meaningful ways, always with an eye on the groundedness of what Max is going through.
The scarring effects of infidelity and mortality thrown in sharp and questioning relief are not light and easily brushed away things and May doesn’t treat them as such, giving them their due and letting the course of Max’s stop-start healing from both feel real and affectingly weighty.
Wrapped around some very real life moments, which are explored in the context of family and friendship and some big where-to-next moments, May uses beautifully worked-in humour and a lovely sense of the possible and fun to give Max the kind of happy-ever-after journey she deserves and which makes sense against the backdrop of life at its most ugly and unpleasant.
Every rom-com worth its name, and Duck à l’Orange for Breakfast is definitely a worthy and top-shelf member of the genre, knows that life must end up on a happy note for the protagonist and while it’s not a spoiler at all to say that’s where Maxine definitely ends up – though how is a delicious (literally) and wondrously enticing mystery – it’s how she arrives there, with a slew of life lessons and moments funny and sobering that makes the such an empathetically rich and funny read.
You will fall in love with the humanness and emotionally honesty and truthfulness of Max as much as she falls in love with where life her and where it takes her to, and her adventures in the dark shadows and sunny uplands of life will make Duck à l’Orange for Breakfast one of those romantic novels that stay in your heart because after all is said and done we all want a happy ending but knowing that the getting there can be a massive battle and one not easily won.