Stevie, a recovering alcoholic and kitchen manager of Chappy's, a small chain restaurant, is frantically trying to prevent the people around her from going supernova: her PTSD-suffering veteran son, her uproariously demented parents, the polyglot eccentrics who work in her kitchen, the blind geriatric dog she inherits, and a damaged five-year-old who landed on her doorstep and might just be her granddaughter.
In the tight grip of new corporate owners, Stevie battles corporate's "restructuring" to save her kitchen, while trying to learn to forgive herself and maybe allow some love back into her life. Stevie's biting, hilarious take on her own and others' foibles will make you cheer and will have you loving Misconduct of the Heart (in the immortal words of Stevie's best line cook) "like never tomorrow."
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[Bob is up my ass about the kitchen staff not completing their e-learning, a Corporate time-waster]***
(@ecwpress, 21 April 2020, 400 pages, ebook, #ARC from @ecwpress via # NetGalley and voluntarily reviewed)
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I really enjoyed this book. Strube touches on a broad range of subjects which really resonate in today's society including Alzheimer's disease, PTSD, drug addiction, immigration and gang rape. Not to heavy then! The main character is Stevie, who works in a pretty awful and thankless job as a kitchen manager for a forgettable branch of Chappy's. I sort of loved her; she comes across as so real it was painful to read about her hard, sometimes harsh life. I have no idea if Chappy's is based on a real chain of restaurants but I completely believed in it, low pay, hard work, cold corporate owners who only care about money and the very limited 'perks' of the shitty job being chipped away daily due to poor performance. Stevie is struggling to cope with caring for her father whose physically ailing, her mother who has Alzheimer's and her son who has PTSD all the while trying to come to terms with being gang-raped. Give this woman a gold star already! The characters were fantastic. They felt like real people. I loved them and they broke my heart a little.
