My lovely wife is a big Elin Hilderbrand fan.  She writers novels of life and love on Nantucket — lately two a year, a summer one with a beach cover and a Christmas one with a homey cover of a Nantucket house with Crhstmas decorations.  My wife talked me into reading Hilderbrand’s latest, The Rumor.  The cover is typical:

And here’s a typical paragraph.  The action takes place just after 40-something Grace has started her affair with the hunky landscape architect:

Grace served a cold roast chicken, a fresh head of butter lettuce, a crock of herbed farmer’s cheese, and fat, rosy radishes pulled from the garden.  She cut thick slices of bread from a seeded multigrain loaf with a nice chewy crust, then she went back into the fridge and pulled out sweet butter, a jar of baby gherkins, a stick of summer sausage, and some whole-grain mustard.

This is not a paragraph a man wants to read, although the hunky landscape architect finds the meal absolutely delightful.

Anyway, the novel is perfectly okay-if-you-like-that-sort-of-thing, and Hilderbrand seems to be a perfectly extraordinary human being, who writes two novels a year while raising three kids and battling breast cancer.

Plus, she has an app.  I didn’t know that was a thing, but her publisher, Hachette, seems to think this is a good idea.  It doesn’t seem to be updated a lot — it doesn’t list The Rumor among her novels, for example, and the Recipes section is pretty thin for someone who writes paragraphs like the one I quoted (and she doesn’t seem to know how to spell the word kernel).  But, you know, it’s an app.

I want one.