Didn't You Use to Be Queenie B?

A Novel

De: Terri-Lynne DeFino

Narrado por: Eva Kaminsky

For everyone who loved The Bear! An utterly winning, crowd-pleaser of a novel about a disgraced celebrity chef, her striving protégé, and their path through the kitchen to redemption.

Regina Benuzzi is Queenie B—a culinary goddess with Michelin Star restaurants, a bestselling cookbook empire, and multimillion-dollar TV deals. It doesn’t hurt that she’s gorgeous and curvaceous, with cascading black hair and signature red lips.

She had it all. Until she didn’t.

After an epic fall from grace, Queenie B vanishes from the public eye, giving up everything: her husband, her son, and the fame that she’d fought to achieve. Her shows are in rerun, her restaurants still popular, but her disappearance remains a mystery to her legions of fans.

Local line cook Gale Carmichael also knows a thing or two about disaster. Newly sober and struggling, Gale’s future dreams don’t hold space for culinary stardom; only earning enough to get by. Broke at the end of the week, he finds himself at a local soup kitchen in one of the roughest parts of New Haven, Connecticut. But Gale quickly realizes that the food coming out of the kitchen is not your standard free meal—it is delicious and prepared with gourmet flair.

Gale doesn’t recognize Regina, the soup kitchen’s cranky proprietor, whose famous black mane is now streaked with gray. It’s been more than ten years since Queenie B vanished into her careful new existence. But she sees Gale’s talent and recognizes a brokenness in him that she knows all too well. The culinary genius in hiding takes him under her wing.

Teaching Gale, Regina’s passion to create is reignited, and they both glimpse a shot at the redemption that had always seemed out of reach. When Gale is chosen to compete on the hit cooking show, Cut!, it’s a turning point for them both.

It’s Gale’s time to shine. And that means Queenie B might just have to come out of hiding…

©2025 Terri-Lynne DeFino (P)2025 HarperCollins Publishers

Great story about redemption.

This is a thoughtful story highlighting two flawed characters who are living in the present as much as in the past. It’s a story of redemption, and how giving oneself grace when you’ve taken, the wrong path in life might be the first step in healing.
If you’ve lived firsthand with someone facing the problem of addiction, then this story will resonate with you. Because I have known what it is like to care about somebody who has an addiction, problem, and I sometimes struggled with “liking “ Regina. Yet it didn’t mean I was lacking an empathy for the mistakes she made. Some of her mistakes were very hard to swallow, and yet who’s perfect? I don’t want to give anything about the plot away, but do feel this story is a journey worth taking.

was a wonderful story with such well seasoned characters.

I love this book. very rich in detail. All the characters were very well developed. it touched on some difficult topics while showing a lot of humanity toward people with addictions. it was an uplifting story that showed it's never too late for redemption and self-forgiveness.