Published last month, Providence novelist Riss M. Neilson’s The Bridge Back to You is a second-chance romance with a Providence setting and a compelling foodie angle. While romance readers will find plenty to enjoy in these pages, the novel also touches on larger themes like the entanglements of family and the meaning of inheritance. As befits a Providence novel, every table is laden with delicious food, and there’s always a crowd to enjoy it.
Recently divorced and approaching thirty, Olivia Jones is working as a private chef in Houston when she’s contacted by ex-boyfriend Carmello Rodriguez, a chef at his mother’s Filipino eatery in Providence, whose gruff exterior does not quite conceal his smoldering interest in Olivia. But Carmello has no intention of rekindling their romance, which started in the kitchen at Celia’s Place and ended abruptly when Olivia, restless and prone to wanderlust, left Providence. Wounded, Carmello would like nothing more than to forget Olivia. But this becomes hard to do after Carmello’s dying mother bequeathes Celia’s Place jointly to Carmello and Olivia. Celia’s death brings Olivia back to Providence, where she must collaborate with still-resentful Carmello in order to manage her share of the business.
The novel’s chapters alternate between Olivia’s perspective and Carmello’s, permitting the reader to see what each character gets wrong about the other and providing a ring-side seat to the tense interpersonal dynamic that roils their relationship. Olivia isn’t nearly as flighty as Carmello thinks she is, and his demand for rock-solid stability sets the bar too high. No one is going to give him that security, though his ex-wife, with whom he harmoniously co-parents a son, is one such rock-solid character. (Not surprisingly, she bores him.) Carmello must learn to trust Olivia, and Olivia must come to understand that Carmello’s anxious guarding of his innermost self is not intended to frustrate her. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that he comes by his diffidence honestly.
The novel abounds with sensuality, and Neilson handles intimate scenes deftly. There were very few moments when I felt myself cringe. But the sexy scenes aren’t really the point. As I was reading, I kept thinking about the double-sidedness of romance, a word that can refer to a relationship as well as a story. In The Bridge Back to You, the story turns not on sex or even romance but on a problematic inheritance. What would normally yoke two family members—a 50/50 spilt of an estate—is refigured as a mother’s strong hint to her son about where his most familial interests lie. As an inheritance, Celia’s Place is not just a property. It’s a message.
There are other difficult inheritances. Carmello’s struggles with his mental health, for instance, find an echo in his son. But, illness is not the center of the novel.. Rather, illness functions as another way to show that a family is made of people who come through for each other, on bad days especially. This family might also be chosen, like the family of strangers that coalesces in the welcoming warmth of Celia’s Place, which is itself cradled within the tight weave of relationships and history that is so characteristic of the city. The restaurant is “an integral part of the Providence community,” Carmello says. “People come for birthdays, we cater weddings and baby showers, my mom was asked to be a godparent to a customer’s child. The priest who baptized me still comes in for lunch.” That’s Providence!
Overall Neilson is a careful chronicler of interactions; particularly in scenes from Olivia’s point of view, I always understood how external events, in the past and the present, are connected with her shifting inner emotional weather. This painstaking attention to minute details of interaction—the tilt of a face, a twitching lip—is particularly useful when it comes to bringing readers closer to Carmello who, not being much of a talker, doesn’t always explain his point of view. With a character who is so tight-lipped, giving the reader direct access to his inner life is a smart move. He’s a heartthrob, to be sure, but he’s also a shrewd businessman as well as a talented chef. Overcoming his reluctance to do more marketing, he cuts immediately to the heart of the problem: “Food can only speak for itself if people are coming to the restaurant to eat it.”
This novel is Neilson’s second for adults, preceded by A Love Like the Sun (2024), another slow-burn romance. She’s also the author of two YA novels. So it was disappointing to find Neilson occasionally making choices that are dismissive of the reader. Olivia’s family background doesn’t get much airtime. Neilson explains that history—Olivia’s parents are distant high-flyers whose work keeps them on the road—in a breezy section that is at odds with the somber facts. At one point, Olivia’s family loses their home “in a tragic wildfire”—but what else would it be besides tragic? Neilson’s exposition hurries the reader along, as if Olivia’s family history is irrelevant to her, even as she must draw on that background to forge a better relationship with Carmello.
Early in the novel, while she’s still in Houston trying to figure out how to make her way back to Providence and Carmello, Olivia goes on a bad first date. Incurious about her preferences, he orders a steak to share and then flubs the plating. “You’d think this man was using a butter knife,” Olivia acidly observes, “the way he’s fighting for his life to carve our steak.” Carmello has no such difficulties with Olivia; most things go easy between them. Later on, Olivia allows herself to notice this ease and finally to accept it. “Why shouldn’t it be easy?” she asks herself. “You get to stay. Be a chef at this restaurant you love with people you adore. Isn’t this how you wanted it to happen?” She ends with a line that’s sure to resonate: “Hasn’t Providence always been calling you home?”
The Bridge Back to You is available at local book stores like Riff Raff, Heartleaf Books, and Symposium Books.
Providence writer Diane Josefowicz‘s second novel, The Great Houses of Pill Hill, will be published next month by Soho. Join her for the launch on Friday evening, May 15, at Books on the Square.
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