Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

I was expecting Jenny Colgan’s Little Beach Street Bakery to be foodie chick lit, I suppose; feel good and drool-worthy (because I love bread!) but on the fluffy side.  Instead, I found a story that left me thinking about progress versus change, about what kind of changes you ought to be willing to make for those you love, and about what relationships can become if we make the effort to reach out, to be patient, and to forgive.

I also found more language than I needed, particularly for an audio book.*  It’s easier to skip over f-words and serious religious profanity when your eyes can slide over them quickly, but when listening, those particular words get as much emphasis as everything else, and you can’t do much about it.  I’m not saying that at least some of that language didn’t fit the characters, but that doesn’t mean I needed to hear it,  you know?

Overall, however, this was a book that caught and held me.  I stayed up way too late listening to one part of it because I wasn’t going to head off to bed without knowing if anyone had been lost at sea during the storm, and I finished it while putting dinner into my crockpot yesterday morning.  The jacket description gives you a basic summary–Polly’s life falls apart and she ends up renting a dilapidated flat in a seaside town in Cornwall, and while her baking starts out as a hobby (and a self-soothing mechanism), it becomes something else entirely over time–but it doesn’t quite do all of the themes in it justice.  Yes, there are certainly elements of chick lit, but I laughed out loud AND got teary over parts that had little or nothing to do with the main characters.  If you can deal with some language, this is a good read.

*The language in and of itself made this a book I wish I’d read instead of listened to, but if that doesn’t bother you and you’re considering the audio, you should know that the reader’s male voices are frequently a bit creepy, and the hero’s “southern accent” (he’s supposed to be from Georgia) makes Vivien Leigh’s sound like the most authentic one ever uttered.  I suppose it’s tough when the narrator’s British, but for Pete’s sake, listening to Huckle talk was painful.