by Amy Bronwen Zemser
ages: 12+
First sentence: “When Elaine Hamilton was six years old, she told her mother she wanted to be a cook when she grew up.”

Elaine Hamilton has been cooking since she was small. Her favorite person is Julia Child, and she decided very early on that she wanted to be exactly like her. Elaine’s father bought her a boxed set of Mastering the Art of French Cooking (volumes one and two) when she was eight, and she has spent the last nine years memorizing and mastering the recipes. All but the lowly omlette; that she can not make.

Every time Elaine hits a snag in her cooking, she writes a letter to Julia Child. Except that she doesn’t mail them. They sit in a trunk in her room, testimonies to her passion, her desire to be a chef, and… to her inability to make friends.

That is, until Lucida Sans (yes, she’s named after the computer font) comes into Elaine’s life. With a bang. Literally. They form an unusual friendship, that leads (because of Lucida’s weakness for a certain handsome cad) to an attempt at a cable show and, ultimately, to the Young Chef’s American Culinary Competition.

In some ways, the book is absolutely delightful. It has a fairy-tale quality (including what I thought was a hokey ending, that M pointed out it completly fit the fairy-tale-ness of the book) that was entertaining and charming. Both Elaine and Lucida were fun, sweet, enjoyable characters. Even the cad was amusing with all his preening and begging.

But, with all the sweetness, there was an underlying brashness. Elaine’s mother, an old-school feminist and a Congresswoman, dislikes her daughter’s love of cooking. In fact, the rest of the first page underscores this quite well:

“Oh, Elaine,” she had said, hurriedly stuffing papers into her briefcase, “Can’t you aspire to something higher? Twenty years since liberation and you want to stay home and slave over a burner?”

I wanted to throttle the woman. She spent the whole book underappreciating her daughter’s ability (I can’t even pronounce half of what Elaine can cook, let alone prepare it!), and trying to force her daughter to be exactly like her. (While Elaine’s brothers are free to do what they will.) The nerve of the woman. (Can you tell this really bothered me?)

And then there’s the tone of the book. The narrator bothered me at first, and while the annoyance went away, I was never fully able to lose myself in the book. (Perhaps this same critique can be said of The Disreputiable History of Frankie Landau-Banks?) I kept being bothered by the way the story was being told. And then there was the hokey ending. After finishing, I thought it was overly corny, but I can see M’s point: there is a bit of the unreal, the fairy tale perfect about it. Which, while it rubbed me the wrong way, really does suit the book.

All that aside, what I really wished was that Zemser would spend time being more sensuous about Elaine’s cooking. She dropped a lot of French words and terms, but never really described anything except the processes that Elaine used to make. I’d like to know more about the dishes (besides that they were delicious), about the smells, the sounds, the tastes. In the end, it left me not filled and satiated, as I was hoping, but empty, wishing for more.

Which is too bad. Because it was a cute little story.