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Hmmmm...I see a lot of people here liked this book. For me the writing style was almost embarrassingly florid, and simile-laden. WAY too saccherine for me.
The School of Essential Ingredients is a story of a cooking class, but is oh so much more! The spices, smells, textures, and flavors throughout the book are used as connection points to the students, their lives, memories, needs, and secrets. As you read this book, you get a warm, cozy feeling from it that lingers with you. You can almost smell and taste right through the book. This is a book I probably would never have picked up, and if I had, it would have taken a long time for me to finally t...
While I did finish this book, mainly to read about the food, this topic has been done before and done better, I think (by Joanne Harris and Sarah Addison Allen). I did not mind the magical realism (I am a fan of Alice Hoffman's, after all!) but the writing left a lot to be desired. I found the writing repetitious and the author used FAR TOO MANY SIMILES. By the middle of the book I was mentally groaning every time I encountered yet another simile. Another thing that annoyed me was her over-use o...
When an ARC arrives at my house, it usually goes in the stack of ARCs waiting to be read. But recently, I have cut down on ARC requests and have been diligently making my way through them. I’m pretty sure I only have one left in the stack to read. So, when The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister arrived on Tuesday, it was serendipitous timing - I had just finished Blindspot, and hadn’t picked up another book yet.I started it Tuesday night, staying up way too late reading. It gr...
Sweet. Slice of life. Not very plot driven, but a lovely, foodie read where we meet a group of people who come together for a cooking class. We get a brief look at their back story and a glimpse into their current situation as they bond and build relationships with each other throughout the course of this class. It was a quick, heartwarming read.
I am not sure if this book can be called a culinary exercise in poetic philosophy. But if it can work, then that is what I feel it is. Add a touch of fairyland and a dollop of romance to it and the end result is a gentle, dreamy, adventure into vegetables and meat.Lilian runs a restaurant and offers cooking classes on Monday evenings when her business is closed. Through her teachings she is changing the lives of the participants who all came for different reasons to attend the lessons. They all
Comfy, delectable, poetic and beautiful ~ a perfect book to read while the world is falling apart around us.
My turn on the hotline was fairly quiet and I was able to quickly read this lovely debut (2009) novel of food and relationships. 4 stars for the enjoyment it brought me. It falls in line with a number of similarly styled novels such as Garden Spells, Water for Chocolate & Chocolat, but without as much magical realism infused throughout. The drop of magic comes from Lillian's uncanny ability to read people and know what kind of food lessons will meet their needs, which also reminded me of the boo...
A cabin weekend read, recommended (sadly) by NPR. I ended up reading parts aloud to Mara and Abby while we all read by the lake this weekend, because the writing was so florid (and because a grieving husband makes a very creepy tribute to his dead wife, involving her ashes and a cake served to her mourning friends). The author made a rookie mistakes of writing from the perspectives of all of the characters while maintaining the florid, simile-laden language with every character, so you are force...
I've given 5-star ratings to a lot of books I've really liked. But "The School of Essential Ingredients" is on a totally different plane. This is a novel of pure love, toward food and toward life. I've never said this in any other review I've written either on here or in my movie reviews: This book will change your life, no matter if you simply read it straight through without much reaction. Scenes will creep into your memory at times you never expected. If you're not a foodie, you'll become a b...
This is a glorious book. It's about food as a touchstone and a means for memory,community, nurturing, healing, loving, seduction, sustenance, pleasure, joy, beginning, endings--life. It is the story of a cooking class that learns far more than culinary skills at the hands of a chef whose wisdom is not limited to food stuffs. The language is lush and decadent, rolling off the page and into your mind like a drug. I could taste, smell, see and feel everything as if I was indeed standing at the prep...
I picked this because it was short and I was waiting for my other audiobook to get here so I didn’t want something that was going to take forever, in case the other book arrived within the week. I had no idea what it was really about except people coming together to cook and heal. That sounded nice. And it was nice. Actually, the story, itself, is quiet and lovely, centered on food and the individual lives of people in a winter cooking class.I liked the first several pages, the idea of a little
