Title: North to You Series: Journey to the Heart #1
Author: Tif Marcelo
Published: June 5, 2017
Genre(s): Romance: Contemporary
Page Count: 315
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:In this warmhearted and charming debut from Tif Marcelo, a food truck chef and her long lost Army love clash when they cross paths in San Francisco.
Camille Marino has got a full plate. As the sole guardian of her eighteen-year-old sister and the head chef and owner of a food truck, she’s used to life being a juggling act. With food to cook, social media accounts to manage, and a little sister to look after, she doesn’t have time for much else.
That is, until Drew Bautista walks back into her life.
Drew is Camille’s former high school crush and he returns to San Francisco to repair his relationship with his father before he ships out for deployment. By helping his father renovate his failing Filipino restaurant, he hopes to win back his respect. But when sparks fly between Drew and Camille—his father’s major competition and sworn enemy—Drew is conflicted. Should he join his father in the war against her food truck? Or surrender to the woman who’s given him a second chance at love?
Never have I ever read a romance novel where the protagonist’s Big Secret is that she owns a food truck. First time for everything, right?
North to You is a breezy foodie romance starring a food truck owner in San Francisco and an Army lieutenant who’s in town to help renovate his family’s Filipino restaurant. I loved the premise of this novel, and I can firmly attest that Tif Marcelo has a definite love of food that adds so much to this book’s narrative. However, I can also say that this book reads like a debut novel—it needs some polish and some help straightening out the kinks.
For one thing, this is supposed to be a second chance romance. Camille and Drew were together for a few weeks in high school, until Camille’s parents suddenly died and she moved in with her grandmother. They never saw or heard from each other again. Marcelo kinds of mentions this prior relationship, but never does anything with it. There are no residual feelings or traumas to be sorted through on the part of either protagonist, so for all intents and purposes, the “second chance at love” trope is completely wasted here. There is nothing in the way the romance progresses in North to You that would have been different if Cami and Drew had just met each other for the first time in their mid-twenties.
And I guess that’s a good segue into the major problem with this novel overall: not enough depth of characterization. I’m not asking for angst or navel-gazing, but the focus of a romance novel should always be on the characters and their interactions with one another. Some outside conflict is good (probably preferred), of course, but the author should never sacrifice character development on the altar of an exciting plot. Which is exactly what Tif Marcelo does here.
The story goes like this. Cami and Drew meet at a food truck festival in San Francisco. They realize they know each other and reconnect. Over a series of a couple dates and some super-cute emails, they fall in love. Except (for some inexplicable reason), Cami has never told Drew what she does for a living: she owns a food truck that specializes in paninis and homemade baked goods. There’s a strange amount of angst about telling him the truth, and it all kind of gears up to a seemingly overblown confession that would have been more appropriate if Cami had an undisclosed STI, a secret love-child, or was on the run from a serial killer. Up until the halfway point, it really does seem like the author is just manufacturing conflict unnecessarily.
But then Cami tells Drew about her food truck, and all hell breaks loose. It turns out Drew’s dad has a vendetta against food trucks, and is salty that Cami’s food truck has been “stealing” their customers. Drew’s dad then files an appeal with the city to create a radius around their restaurant, prohibiting Cami from parking within one block of the restaurant. Meanwhile, there’s a vicious social media war waging between Cami and whichever one of Drew’s cousins is running the restaurant’s Twitter account. Some pretty gnarly stuff, as you can see. Drew, obviously, is caught in the middle, and decides not to let his girlfriend know that the restaurant she’s currently feuding with is owned by his family. Smart move, genius.
Of course, all the secrets come to light, and there is a Big Misunderstanding. Cami thinks Drew purposely sabotaged her food truck business just to help out his parents. It’s a romance novel, so she comes to her senses just as Drew is getting on the plane to deploy to Iraq. The epilogue sees Drew proposing to Cami at the reopening of her food truck seven months later.
So that’s the plot of North to You in a nutshell. But do you notice something? All of the conflict in this romance is completely separate and unrelated to the developing relationship between the protagonists. In fact, for the second half of the novel, there was no character growth or exploration of their connection whatsoever. The drama surrounding the food truck and the restaurant consumed and overpowered what was supposed to be the main draw of the book: the romance.
Opinions will obviously vary, and maybe some readers will appreciate a book that isn’t so focused on the characters’ internal conflict. Personally, I think there’s a difference between two people working through outside issues together as a couple, and two people stuck in a stagnant relationship as the outside issues take precedence over their own relationship. North to You is the second kind of book. Cami and Drew do not attack their problems together—in fact they flat-out lie about all of their problems up until the end. They weren’t a team, and they weren’t supporting each other. If you’re going to write a romance where the primary obstacle the couple faces is situational and not emotional, I’m going to need a lot more honesty, and fast.
North to You gets the foodie aspect right, but drops the ball on developing a strong, believable romantic connection.
