Book Review: Eat Cake

I've had Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns checked out from the library for a month now but because of everything I have on my plate right now, haven't expended my energy to read it--I know it will envelop me and I just can't afford that right now. So, when I took the boys to story time last week, I perused the isles a few times and Eat Cake by Jeanne Ray popped out at me because my old ward's book club was reading it right when we moved. I checked it out and here's what I thought:

THINGS I LOVED

• the cake recipes in the back of the book


• It's simplicity--it was a light enough read that I could definitely put it down when I needed to.

THINGS THAT BUGGED ME

• The first sentence of the book is this: Years ago, I went to a seminar on stress reduction at the Y. That abbreviation means one thing to me: BYU. I pictured her sitting in one of the conference rooms in the Conference center behind Desert Towers and the BYU Creamery. So on pages 12 and 13 when the whole family sat down to dinner with mixed drinks of vodka and oj, I was a little thrown off--I re-read the first sentence and realized she had meant the YMCA. It's hard to change mental images once they've been established, even if after only 13 pages.


• It's simplicity. (didn't I just say that loved it's simplicity? I both love and hate it for that reason.) I don't love books that don't wrap me up in the characters and make me root them on and think about them as real people for days after I'm finished. And I don't love this book because it didn't do just that. In fact, I'm having trouble writing this review even though I just finished it yesterday afternoon. The story was so simple and seemed to wrap complicated real life things (losing a job, caring for a temporarily disabled and estranged father, starting your own business from scratch,) into a tidy little package with a bow and a happily ever after. Not my thing.