Features My Days of Dark Green Euphoria by A.E. Copenhager and The Green and the Red by Armand Chauvel.
My Days of Dark Green Euphoria:
Thirtysomething Cara Foster is, one might say, eco-anxious—perhaps even eco-neurotic. She eats out of dumpsters (not because she wants to but because it’s the right thing to do), does laundry as seldom as possible, takes navy showers every couple of days, and is reevaluating her boyfriend for killing a spider instead of saving a life.
Cara has never met her six (soon to be seven) nephews and nieces because she doesn’t fly domestic (unless it’s an emergency) or international (ever). She longs for a carbon footprint so light you’d hardly know she exists.
Then, during a mimosa-soaked Sunday brunch, she meets her boyfriend’s alluring mother, Millie, and Cara finds herself mesmerized. Millie represents everything Cara’s against: She eats meat, has cowhide rugs, drives a car the size of a small yacht, and blithely travels the world by boat, plane, and train—without any guilt whatsoever. In fact, Cara soon admits this may be why she finds herself so drawn to Millie. As they begin spending time together, getting pedicures and drinking sixteen-olive martinis, Cara becomes hooked on Millie and this new freedom from the harsh realities of life in the twenty-first century.
Yet before long, Cara risks losing everything to be close to the mundane extravagance of Millie’s world—her career, her best friend, and her identity all hang in the balance as she struggles to disentangle from this intoxicating muse.
The Green and the Red:
She’s a vegetarian. He’s a carnivore.
Will it be a table for one?
Meet Léa. She’s the idealistic owner and chef of La Dame Verte, a vegetarian restaurant struggling in a small French town in Brittany.
Meet Mathieu. He’s the carnivorous marketing director of the town’s biggest pork producer, which is trying to put Léa out of business to take over the restaurant's prime real estate.
When Léa and Mathieu first cross paths, it is under false pretenses—Mathieu is posing as a vegetarian, infiltrating the local animal rights community for information that will force Léa’s restaurant toward a swifter demise. And while Léa suspects that Mathieu isn’t all that he appears to be, she has no idea how deep his culinary deception goes. Neither of them can deny the attraction they feel for each other, and it seems as though they might be setting a table for two … until Léa learns the truth.
Translated from the French (Le Vert et Le Rouge), The Green and the Red is at once a romantic comedy and a comedy of errors—two people from different worlds coming together in a small French town immersed in the culture of food.