title: Belle in the Big Apple: A Novel with Recipes
author:  Brooke Parkhurst 
description: Parkhurst, former blogger and media gossip staple turned Web-and-TV culinary personality, brings considerable Southern charm and sass (plus some mouth-watering recipes) to her chick lit debut, but there's no mistaking the revenge fantasy at the heart of this tale of struggle and success. The former Fox News Channel correspondent plunks her Mobile, Ala., debutante narrator, Belle Lee, at a smarmy news network, where she begins her rise to the media heap from the very bottom. Determined not to be trampled, Belle turns supersleuth and discovers the sticky political web woven by her American News Channel bosses and uses the goods as leverage to get her own pieces on air. Even if I had to work for horn dogs and thieves... I would produce a piece that would get me a job as a 'real' journalist, Belle vows in a never go hungry again moment. Predictably, Belle breaks out from under the bad guys and shifts her professional focus to something more heartfelt. There aren't any surprises, but the tartly told story is a genuine guilty pleasure. <i>(Sept.)</i> <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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  # Acknowledgments
  
  
  As always, family provides the core of support needed to make a novel happen:
  my husband Josh, my mother and father, Jim Hill and Kate Connor; the Esons
  family; Melanie, Jonathan and Helen Lewis; Florence and Joyce. This book even
  more than any other was the product of intense group work, so many thanks to:
  Delia Sherman, Holly Black, Sarah Rees Brennan, Justine Larbalestier, Elka
  Cloke, Robin Wasserman, and special mention to Maureen Johnson for lending her
  name to the character Maureen. Thanks to Wayne Miller for helping me with
  Latin translations. Thanks to Margie Longoria for her support of Project Book
  Babe: Michael Garza, the owner of the Big Apple Deli, is named for her son,
  Michael Eliseo Joe Garza. My always gratitude to my agent, Barry Goldblatt; to
  my editor, Karen Wojtyla; to Emily Fabre, for making changes long past the
  time changes can be made; to Cliff Nielson and Russell Gordon, for making
  beautiful covers; and to the teams at Simon and Schuster a