Review: Between Taste and Sound

Juan Zamora, Between Taste and Sound, (2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/214495004-between-taste-and-sound

The Cuisine game challenges contestants to match their wit to their taste buds

Yoishi, our narrator, nickname Fluffy (due to his lucky bunny rabbit sandals), works for rich families, tasting their food, checking for poison. Lady Catherine accosts him, ‘how dare you eat our food, commoner?’

The Cuisine game was invented to get wealthy people together with royalty and celebrities. Yoishi just wants to get a paycheck.

The client Roberto books him for another gig. He’s scoffed the whole six-thousand-dollar dish before Roberto says, ‘time to go over the rules to this cuisine game’.

Next, he’s playing the Cuisine game in Paris. The singer – Ricky Rock – is about to play the game; his friend Tommy Lee says, ‘let’s prank them.’ The girl – April – is missing.

Yoishi decides it’s time for him to set the rules.

The cover is deceptive. I put off reading it for ages thinking it would be a ‘dukes and debutantes’ novel.

The idea of the Cuisine game is quite cute, but the text needs a very heavy edit. The dialogue tends to jump around a bit, making it unrealistic. The narrative jumps illogically between present tense and past tense, sometimes mid-sentence. The plot is incoherent in places, and many of the sentences are incomprehensible. Humorous, but sometimes I felt the joke carried on too long to be funny. For example, the bunny rabbit sandals, with varied spellings, were mentioned 11 times. We were supposed to guess who the celebrities are, but I didn’t.