Spitting Feathers by Kelly Harte

I read Harte's "Guilty Feet" almost a year ago and really liked it, so I bought her only other novel with some of my amazon gift card money that my bf gave me for Christmas. I only wish this talented chic lit author would write more books.

In Spitting Feathers, Tao is a young woman living in London who left her boring bank job and boring fiance to try her luck as a photographer in the city. She won an award for a photo of a rotten watermelon and decides to try her luck as a food photographer. She needs to find a place to live since her best friend's posh roommates are sick of her crowding the flat. She finds the perfect place in a really posh neighborhood, house-and-pet-sitting for a rich older woman. The pet in question is an African Grey parrot named Sir Galahad who has a colorful vocabulary that he uses at inopportune times.

Living in the basement flat is the gardener, Chris, who doesn't seem to get along with Tao very well. Tao lands a job photographing food for a TV chef's new cook book, and it turns out the not-quite-single chef has his eye on more than Tao's camera. Tao also has to contend with a hippie dippie mother and her employer's sneaky thief of a nephew. The characters are great and the book is laugh-out-loud funny at times, especially the scenes with Sir Galahad.