Too Soon for Adiós

Too Soon for Adiós by Annette Chavez Macias (2023) was an impulse library shelf pick that surprised me with how good it was! (For being a random pick I knew nothing about.)

As the book opens, twenty-nine year old Gabby is dealing with the death of her mother from cancer. She had quit her sous-chef job with a famous chef to take care of her, but now she has student loans and bills due. Her stepfather died when she was a teenager, and now the only family she has are her mother’s best friends, her aunties–one who lives in East L.A. where she and her mom were staying, and the other who lives in Las Vegas.

At the funeral, a man comes up to her and introduces himself as her father. Initially hostile, Gabby wants nothing to do with Saul, who lives in New Mexico. He tries to make amends for the decades of no contact by offering her his grandmother’s house for her to fix up and then sell. Gabby initially doesn’t even consider it, but after her attempt to go back to her sous-chef job ends up very badly, she realizes that she has nothing to lose, so she packs her few things in her car and decides to take him up on his offer, so she can at least pay off the bills.

In Sonrisa, New Mexico, Gabby learns that her father is the chef and owner of Carlita’s Cochina, a restaurant with a four-star rating on Yelp that has been in the family for generations. She immediately meets Diego Paz, the town mayor who wears a baseball cap and jeans, and happens to be a popular handyman who is a good friend to her father and is hired to help fix up the house, but she is prickly and he is protective of his town and his friend. She also meets the neighbor, Lola, who was friends with her great-grandmother, and learns more about her father’s family.

Diego is kind and complicated, having been a doctor in a previous career, and together they work on the house and become friends. Gabby becomes part of the community in Sonrisa, and when she finds the original recipes from Carlita’s Cochina, she decides to put her own spin on them, with great success.

Of course, Gabby and Diego become more than friends, and Gabby has to decide whether she’s going to sell her great-grandmother’s house and go back to L.A. or stay in Sonrisa where she’s found family and community.

When I was reading, I had glossed over at the beginning that Gabby is described as having “never been skinny” which was a point of contention between her and her mother. Later she says to Diego that “in case you haven’t noticed, I’m not exactly an athletic kind of girl”–which made me rethink my internal picture of her. Gabby is fat! Or at least “not skinny”!

So not only was Too Soon for Adiós a compelling story about dealing with grief, finding community, purpose, and reconnecting with family, with a bit of romance, it was fat-positive as well! Highly recommend for those who like women’s fiction and stories with Mexican-American heritage and culture.