(courtesy Simon & Schuster Australia)
Well-written romantic comedies are always good for the soul.
There’s something about a rom-com which possesses not only the fairytale loveliness of two people meet-cuting and finding they need each other more than any one else they’ve encountered to date, but also some real emotional depth, characters who feel like 3D-real people (and not mere cardboard human-shaped cutouts in service to a frothy narrative), and dialogue that hits some existential home runs as much as sparkles and leaps merrily and with witty verve off the page.
The very good news about Amy Hutton’s absolute delight of a new novel, Love From Scratch, is that it is indeed a well-written rom-com with all the elements mentioned above, and a great many more.
A more than worthy follow-up to her debut novel, Sit, Stay, Love, Love From Scratch occupies the same rough universe but without the requirement to have read its predecessor.
This means that if you have read Sit, Stay, Love, then hurrah you have extra feels and insight, but since its successor stands very much much on its own two highly appealing feet without the need for backstory, you lose nothing but diving into it first if you’d like to. (But honestly, in a world currently full of far too much hatred and bigotry, reading both books in the order of release can only be good for you and your possible love-starved soul.)
She stepped back into the shadows of the stalls, planning to make a dash for it. She didn’t need another accidental encounter with Ethan James. But then he looked up, glancing around as if somehow aware that she was there, and their eyes locked.
That’s when Hazel’s stomach did something completely unexpected. It flipped.
Love From Scratch rests securely on one of the great tropes of rom-com storytelling – opposites attracting, sparks flying and almost physical vibrating dislike quickly turning to something altogether more positive and hopeful and romantically starry-eyed.
Set up on Queensland, Australia’s Sunshine Coast for the most part, with some of the plot taking place on Sydney’s gloriously lovely Northern Beaches, Love From Scratch takes this very well-worn premise and does something marvelously fresh and fun with it, very much tipping its hat to the idea that you hate what, or rather who, you need to love the most while giving it a voraciously vivacious sense of fun and playfulness.
Even more appealingly, it injects the verbal fun of two people sparring with some real emotional heft and substance, offering a beguilingly lovely story that lets you escape on the sigh-worthy idea that real, true, everlasting love is not just possible but real and here and now (as any good rom-com should do), while also serving up two very grounded people who don’t just drop what they are doing to embrace romance, nor who become emotionally immaculate and whole by sheer dint of meeting the person of their dreams.
And that matters because while Ethan James – a startlingly dreamboat handsome actor who’s infinitely charming, wonderfully down-to-earth and well on his way up the A-list and Hazel Conor – a consummately gifted chef with a gift for taking basic ingredients and making something deliciously divine – have a lot going for them, neither is a perfect person and at no point does Love From Scratch expect them to be to find love, true love without some bumps and scrapes along the way.
Why this matters in a brilliantly well put-together rom-com, and Love From Scratch is all that and more, is that we don’t just want to dream of that kind of love, we want to believe it might just possible in real life.
Too many rom-coms offer up a sparklingly joyous vision of the aftereffects of Cupid’s arrows hitting their intended targets but make the characters and the lives they lead feel so adrift from reality that while all that dreaming is nice, it likely won’t be anything more than a dreamy bubble of wishfulness.
And sure you could argue that Ethan and Hazel do occupy all kinds of rarefied wonderfulness in some respects, and that’s needed to some extent because we want and need their story to be soul-warmingly special, but because Hutton lets them also be flawed and traumatised and broken by past events, it makes their love, when it arrives, feel so much more fully-formed and smile-inducing.
They feel like real people, at least as much a rom-com character can, and thus Love From Scratch feels like the story of two very grounded, broken people with great things at their disposal from warmth of personality to empathetic humanity finding love in a way that feels like somethin within anyone’s grasp.
Rather delightfully too, the animal-centric storytelling of Sit, Stay, Love returns, and it’s not overstating things to stay that much of the plot is pushed along happily by the dogs and cat that populate with real vivacity and personality.
‘You’re sweet really, aren’t you, Kev?’ Ethan said.
‘No, he’s not sweet at all,’ Hazel countered. ‘This is … unusual for him.’ Who did this guy think he was, marching in there and declaring that her cat was sweet? Her cat was an arsehole.
‘Well, then I’m doubly honoured.’ He grinned, and Kevin headbutted his chin.
Hazel pressed her lips together. Even her cat swooned when this guy flashed his smile.
For one thing, Hazel owns an irascible, near antisocial cat, Kevin, a rescue cat who treats his fur mum aka servant as if he did her a favour by letting himself be adopted, and while he treats Hazel with neglectful disdain, he adores Ethan from the moment he meets him.
Clearly he sees something Hazel initially doesn’t, and while she’s inclined to dismiss Ethan out of hand as a superficial, glittery movie star playboy, Kevin thinks otherwise and its his ardent, no-holds-barred love of the star who employs Hazel to mind his dog Harry while he’s filming a movie that makes Hazel wonder if she’s letting some hurtful prejudices from the past influence her more than what’s right before her.
Harry, of course, is the reason why Hazel and Ethan meet at all, and why they keep coming together, and so it’s animals, a great self-admitted love of Hutton’s, that really gives Love From Scratch an extra dimension of warmth and loveliness.
The real joy of reading Love From Scratch is that it reminds you that no matter how broken and lost you feel that love is still possible, and that letting go of ideas from your past, no matter how self-protective they might have been at the time, can open the world up to love, possibility and a sense of unconditional belonging that might have seemed wholly and completely out of reach.
Love From Scratch will make you feel alive with hope, happiness and possibility, and while you will laugh a lot at dialogue that surges happily and with abandon off the page, you will also feel all the things, good and bad, and be reminded that challenging and traumatic though life can be at times, that it can also be beautiful and possible and good, a realisation that will have you closing the book with a smile upon your face and the sense that maybe all those romantic dreams you harbour might not be so ridiculously impossible after all.