published by HarperCollins/William Morrow on April 15, 2025

AMBER LOVE 14-APRIL-2025 This review is a courtesy provided by NetGalley. To support this site and my other work, please consider being a monthly donor at Patreon.com/amberunmasked; you can also buy my books through Amazon (or ask your local retailer to order you copies).

Publisher’s Summary:

For everyone who loved The Bear! An utterly winning, crowd-pleaser of a novel about a disgraced celebrity chef, her striving protégé, and their path through the kitchen to redemption.

Regina Benuzzi is Queenie B—a culinary goddess with Michelin Star restaurants, a bestselling cookbook empire, and multimillion-dollar TV deals. It doesn’t hurt that she’s gorgeous and curvaceous, with cascading black hair and signature red lips.

She had it all. Until she didn’t.

After an epic fall from grace, Queenie B vanishes from the public eye, giving up everything: her husband, her son, and the fame that she’d fought to achieve. Her shows are in rerun, her restaurants still popular, but her disappearance remains a mystery to her legions of fans.

Local line cook Gale Carmichael also knows a thing or two about disaster. Newly sober and struggling, Gale’s future dreams don’t hold space for culinary stardom; only earning enough to get by. Broke at the end of the week, he finds himself at a local soup kitchen in one of the roughest parts of New Haven, Connecticut. But Gale quickly realizes that the food coming out of the kitchen is not your standard free meal—it is delicious and prepared with gourmet flair.

Gale doesn’t recognize Regina, the soup kitchen’s cranky proprietor, whose famous black mane is now streaked with gray. It’s been more than ten years since Queenie B vanished into her careful new existence. But she sees Gale’s talent and recognizes a brokenness in him that she knows all too well. The culinary genius in hiding takes him under her wing.

Teaching Gale, Regina’s passion to create is reignited, and they both glimpse a shot at the redemption that had always seemed out of reach. When Gale is chosen to compete on the hit cooking show, Cut!, it’s a turning point for them both.

It’s Gale’s time to shine. And that means Queenie B might just have to come out of hiding…

Review:

Regrets. Doesn’t everyone have at least one huge one? Maybe a series of smaller ones? Terri-Lynne DeFino is a master at breaking down troubled people with enormous regrets and putting them back together one ingredient at a time. That may take decades—skillfully handled through time hops with each chapter. Didn’t You Used to be Queenie B? plays upon the parallels of financial insecurity and the dangers of wealth. Either one can play a role in a person’s mental health disintegrating.

As the publisher’s summary states, Regina is a celebrity chef with the catchy moniker, Queenie B. Married to Osvaldo and mother to Julian (a special needs child born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome), the height of Queenie’s life is a bacchanalia. As the creator of early cooking shows like today’s popular competitions, Chopped! and Top Chef, Queenie ranked up there with Anthony Bourdain (who gets shout outs inside the story and Acknowledgments. RIP.) Unfortunately, Queenie has some of Bourdain’s self-destructive addictions to work, ambition, and substances. She and Osvaldo owned many restaurants, which, coupled with her television jobs makes them a fortune unrelatable to the impoverished residents of where Regina ends up years later after fleeing New York City in disgrace.

No one knows that the soup kitchen in the economically disadvantaged area of New Haven, Connecticut is owned and operated by the one-time celebrity, Queenie B. Now, simply Regina, she serves outstanding food on a budget, but in a state-of-the-art kitchen. She also keeps quarters in the apartment above which only a few people have ever seen.

The other main character, Gale Carmichael, a rare equal protagonist. Both of them have hearty plots that are more substantial than pop culture’s best mentor/mentee relationships like Obi-Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker. Here, readers get the full stories of each of them without needing prequels and sequels and unlockable bonus content.

When Gale and his three roommates have weeks where they can’t scrape together enough money from their restaurant jobs to feed themselves, they end up at Regina’s Kitchen. It’s usually Kyle and Gale. Kyle is sweet, forgiving, and humble. Gale would never want his parents to know that he’s had to get meals from a soup kitchen. Early on, it’s evident that his father handing him a twenty is not only hard for both of them, but could be for the family since money is so tight.

Gale can’t afford a car which gives him a lot of time for walking, thinking, and also talking to the ghost of Sean—his former friend who died by overdose on a day when the two of them were using heroin. Gale doesn’t know how he survived or why. Every challenge Gale faces comes through his mind as a form of penance as if he deserves to suffer in every aspect of life because he and Sean helped each other shoot up.

Sean’s ghost is always with Gale except when Gale gets into a kitchen and feels the freedom only his culinary skills can bring him. If he’s not busy at Marco’s restaurant, Sean’s voice is his loquacious conscience. Talking back to him is damn hard to hide, but Gale tries.

Queenie’s addictions destroyed everything in her wake. Somehow, her alcoholic/sommelier husband, Oz, managed to be “functional” and got her to relinquish custody of their son. When Gale enters Regina’s Kitchen and has no idea about her previous life, there’s often speculation by other characters that Regina is using Gale as a substitute son or a second chance to get it right.

As the book reaches its climax, it becomes evident that the relationship between Gale and Regina is much more complex than Gale replacing the son she abandoned; and it never ever approaches romance with an embarrassing age gap.

It’s too simplistic to take Gale’s path and apply his actions on Cut!, a food competition show, as his hero’s journey thresholds. The competitions are important. It’s never about whether Gale wins though. He needs to see himself as more than someone who can’t adapt to stress outside of a kitchen environment. He’s succeeding on his own merit at Marco’s restaurant. He decides to volunteer at Regina’s Kitchen because he genuinely likes her passion for food. Not to mention that when he’s helping others, the voices quiet down at least a little inside his head.

Gale’s descents are ones that Regina recognizes all too well. To truly be his mentor—a role she never envisioned for herself—she has to be there to guide him whether it’s about cooking or recovery. Likewise, he’s her mentor in how to be part of a chosen family—how to let people into her world when she’s comfortable giving compassion to people but never accepting any. Despite how much they have in common, they aren’t both Yang and Yang. They are very much a Yin and Yang together. Yang being: forward/aggressive action; making the rules; being in charge. Yin being: taking orders; playing with creativity; taking small steps where there’s certainty in the outcome. Both of them change because of each other and their supporters, Kyle and Marco.

Pacing a labyrinth of highs, lows, regrets, challenges, betrayals, success, and failures, DeFino feeds readers a spoonful at a time with delectable character movements and overall satisfying growth. Gale, Kyle, Lucy (Gale’s mother), Marco, the “Burger Queen” (one of the regulars at the kitchen), of course Regina, but also all the tertiary characters—every single one has an arc that takes them through paces with their own endings.

Summary:

Terri-Lynne DeFino crafts the human experience with characters on polar opposite sides of success and brings them together showing humanity’s commonalities. Everyone is flawed. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone can rise from the ashes with the right support and resources. There’s no personified villain in Didn’t You Used to be Queenie B? DeFino makes the characters their own villains in a remarkably grounded way. She spoils readers with her artful stories.

Rating: 5 Stars

Sub-themes:

• regrets
• second chances
• new lives/chapters
• addictions/recovery
• financial insecurity
• friendship and bonding
• giving and accepting help
• overcoming fears

Related:

Previous podcast with Terri-Lynne DeFinoListen to my interview with the author.

Book Review of Varina Palladino’s Jersey Italian Love Story by Terri-Lynne DeFino

Founder and Editor-in-Chief of AmberUnmasked.com and Vodka O'Clock Podcast. Author of The Farrah Wethers Mysteries, comic book short stories, prose, and non-fiction. Cosplayer and figure model.