Spotlight & Giveaway: Love You a Latke by Amanda Elliot

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Amanda Elliot to HJ!

Hi Amanda and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, Love You a Latke!

 
Thank you so much for having me!
 

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

If Abby Cohen wants to save her beloved small town cafe, she has to make their very first Hanukkah festival a success. She’s forced to strike a deal with her most annoyingly cheerful customer (and the only other Jew in town), Seth: in exchange for pretending to be his Nice Jewish Girlfriend with his family in NYC, he’ll introduce her to all the vendors she needs. Over latkes, doughnuts, and winter adventures in the city, Abby finds herself letting Seth’s irritatingly handsome smile melt her carefully constructed emotional walls. We’ve got a grumpy/sunshine romance, fake dating, and my favorite, only one bed.
 

Please share your favorite line(s) or quote from this book:

Many of my favorite and/or most emotional lines are spoilers! So instead, I’ll go with a tribute to the title food and to anyone who loves potatoes as much as I do: “We took a step forward and suddenly the smell of fresh frying latkes hit my nose. I breathed in deep. I rarely thought that anything could smell better than French fries, but this might smell better than French fries. More surface area for the oil to caress the potato. It was science.”

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

I wrote this book in the middle of summer! For anyone who’s never spent a summer in New York City, let me tell you, it’s very hot and very humid and everything smells like hot garbage and pee. I really appreciated the opportunity this book gave me to pretend it was winter and somebody would be giving me Hanukkah presents and doughnuts sometime soon.

What first attracts your Hero to the Heroine and vice versa?

They’re complete opposites at first, or at least they think they are: Abby is grouchy and closed-off and pessimistic, while Seth is optimistic and sunny and chipper. When they’re forced to actually get to know each other, though, they realize that they perfectly balance each other out.

Did any scene have you blushing, crying or laughing while writing it? And Why?

Again, I don’t want to spoil anything! I did a lot of all three while writing this book, but spicy scenes always make me blush. While this book is mostly closed-door, it does have a very sexy makeout session in bed that definitely made me red.

Readers should read this book….

If you love the holiday season, delicious fried Hanukkah food, and snow (or sipping hot cocoa while looking at snow out the window).

What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have in the works?

I can’t talk about my next rom-com yet, but I have a mystery-romance hybrid coming out next year under the name Bellamy Rose! It’s called POMONA AFTON CAN SO SOLVE A MURDER and it’s a riches-to-rags tale about a hotel heiress who needs to solve her grandmother’s murder to get her trust fund back – think Paris Hilton starring in Only Murders in the Building, with kissing.
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: A print copy of LOVE YOU A LATKE by Amanda Elliot

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: As you can see from the title of the book, food plays a large role in the story and also in many Jewish holidays. Aside from Hanukkah and its (delicious) fried menu, what are some other real-world examples of when specific foods play important roles, whether it’s for a holiday, an event, or an occasion? What do you think makes these particular foods such vital markers or participants in the examples you’ve named?

 
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Excerpt from Love You a Latke:

Here’s Abby and Seth’s first on-page interaction:

“Beautiful day today!” the customer chirped, beaming a mouthful of very white teeth in my direction.

The snow had stopped falling, leaving a murky gray sky behind. The temperature was supposed to hover at that sweet spot between freezing and not freezing, so that what snow was left on the ground would turn into a nasty wet slush and anything that came down the rest of the day would be a sleety icy rain. I said, “It’s supposed to be wet and rainy all afternoon.”

His smile didn’t waver. “Who said rain can’t be beautiful?”

Ugh. When I closed the café at four and walked outside, I’d probably find him singing and dancing as the water poured around him, his tap shoes somehow magically not slipping in the slush. “What can I get you, Seth?”

It was truly a shame he was so annoying, because if not for the whole personality thing he’d actually be handsome. I’d perked up the first time I saw him walk through my door, his green flannel setting off broad shoulders beneath dark hair that curled around his strong cheekbones.

And then he’d opened his mouth.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

Love comes home for the challah-days in this sparkling romance.

Snow is falling, holiday lights are twinkling, and Abby Cohen is pissed. For one thing, her most annoying customer, Seth, has been coming into her café every morning with his sunshiny attitude, determined to break down her carefully constructed emotional walls. And, as the only Jew on the tourism board of her Vermont town, Abby’s been charged with planning their fledgling Hanukkah festival. Unfortunately, the local vendors don’t understand that the story of Hanukkah cannot be told with light-up plastic figures from the Nativity scene, even if the Three Wise Men wear yarmulkes.

Desperate for support, Abby puts out a call for help online and discovers she was wrong about being the only Jew within a hundred miles. There’s one other: Seth.

As it turns out, Seth’s parents have been badgering him to bring a Nice Jewish Girlfriend home to New York City for Hanukkah, and if Abby can survive his incessant, irritatingly handsome smiles, he’ll introduce her to all the vendors she needs to make the festival a success. But over latkes, doughnuts, and winter adventures in Manhattan, Abby begins to realize that her fake boyfriend and his family might just be igniting a flame in her own guarded heart.
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Meet the Author:

Amanda Elliot lives with her husband and daughter in New York City, where she collects way too many cookbooks for her tiny kitchen, runs in Central Park, and writes mysteries under the name Bellamy Rose.
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