Bookish Brews Snapshot
Arsenic & Adobo by Mia P. Manansala
Lila’s life seems to be the perfect blend of rom-com tropes, until she moves back home after a terrible break up and a nasty food critic (her ex boyfriend) drops dead right after eating her new dish.
🍃 Easy Reading 🌳 Family Focused 🍜 Food Focused 🎲 Plot Twists
- Genre: Mystery
Book Review
Delicious, light, mouth watering, comforting, fun
Arsenic and Adobo was such a cosy and comforting read. I was so happy while reading all of it! This is one of those fast and breezy books that you can read really quickly and have a great time. Those books are the absolute best sometimes! I loved the descriptions of food, and the diversity within this book. It really made me feel like we can come together over food and everything will be just a little bit better.
Arsenic and Adobo follows Lila, a girl who has come home to recover from a horrible break up, to work in her family restaurant. While home, she has to deal with meddling aunties and saving her Tita Rosie’s restaurant. Everything starts to fall off the rails when an annoyingly rude food critic drops dead immediately after eating Lila’s experimental dessert. And of course, since Lila served him, the detective seems to think that Lila is the only suspect, unless she can find the true killer and clear her name!
The absolute best part about this book was the food. Not just the mouth watering descriptions of food, which were borderline irresistible, but the wide variety of foods! I absolutely loved that on this journey Lila and Adeena travel to restaurants featuring food from different parts of the world. The descriptions of the foods from so many different countries was so comforting. Especially to read all of those descriptions in the context of a single book! It was absolutely stunning. How often do you see such a mix of cultures and foods? Not often!
I also really loved how light the tone was. This is my first cosy mystery! Can you believe it! It inspired me to write a list of diverse cosies for my blog, because it seems so hard to find them! I love that the tone is light, and it’s full of silly twists and turns. It’s delightful, full of action, and comforting all at once. It had me guessing who was the killer the entire time, and I loved the silly mistakes that Lila made throughout. She’s only an amateur sleuth after all!
Arsenic and Adobo was a delightful read. If you’re in the mood for something light, full of twists and turns, and comforting all at once, this is the book for you! The blending of so many foods from so many different places had my mouth watering the whole time. It made me feel like food can really bring us together. If only just a little bit.
Book Aesthetic
