The Love Goddess' Cooking School

Camilla's Cucinotta: Italian Cooking Classes. Fresh take-home pastas & sauces daily.  Benvenuti! (Welcome!)

Holly Maguire's grandmother Camilla was the Love Goddess of Blue Crab Island, Maine--a Milanese fortune-teller who could predict the right man for you, and whose Italian cooking was rumored to save marriages. Holly has been waiting years for her unlikely fortune: her true love will like sa cordula, an unappetizing old-world delicacy. But Holly can't make a decent marinara sauce, let alone sa cordula. Maybe that's why the man she hopes to marry breaks her heart. So when Holly inherits Camilla's Cucinotta, she's determined to forget about fortunes and love and become an Italian cooking teacher worthy of her grandmother's legacy. But Holly's four students are seeking much more than how to make Camilla's chicken alla Milanese. Simon, a single father, hopes to cook his way back into his daughter's heart. Juliet, Holly's childhood friend, hides a painful secret. Tamara, a serial dater, can't find the love she longs for. And twelve-year-old Mia thinks learning to cook will stop her dad, Liam, from marrying his phony lasagna-queen girlfriend. As the class gathers each week, adding Camilla's essential ingredients of wishes and memories in every pot and pan, unexpected friendships and romances are formed--and tested. Especially when Holly falls hard for Liam . . . and learns a thing or two about finding her own recipe for happiness.

"Senate handles the hefty topics of loss and remembrances with lightness and respect and in so doing, redefines comfort food."

--Publishers Weekly

"Tender, charming, and seasoned with a pinch of old-world magic, The Love Goddess's Cooking School is a warmly rendered story off loss and starting over." --Beth Hoffman, New York Times bestselling author of Saving CeeCee Honeycutt

"The real magic here is Melissa Senate's writing, which laps rhythmically against your heart like gentle waves along the coast." --Claire Cook, bestselling author of Must Love Dogs and Seven Year Switch

Melissa Senate is the author of ten novels, including the bestselling See Jane Date, which was made into an ABC Family TV movie.  She's published short pieces in Everything I've Always Wanted to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume, It's a Wonderful Lie, Flirting with Pride and Prejudice, and American Girls About Town.  A former editor of romance and young adult fiction, she now writes full time on the coast of Maine.