Blue Plate Special
A Novel of Love, Loss, and Food
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3.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Both humorous and heartbreaking, Blue Plate Special serves up an uplifting exploration of the courage it takes to embrace life after loss.
Thirty-three-year-old Julia Daniel doesn't really feel at home anywhere. Her life in L.A. is lonely, and her career as a food stylist for a struggling gourmet magazine falls well short of her desire to be a photographer. Although she liked growing up in Kentucky, ever since her mother's death and her father's remarriage, her birthplace hasn't felt like the right fit either. After the tragic deaths of her father and stepmother in a plane crash, Julia's true odyssey begins. Orphaned and adrift, she tries to find her way in the world while fending off a crazy boss, a pilfering stepsister, and a looming depression.
Though shored up by two good friends and an excellent psychologist who helps her work through her grief, it is an unexpected-and comically disastrous-trip to Sedona for the magazine that finally enables Julia to move forward. Returning to L.A., she searches for the strength to strike out on her own, take a chance on love, and seek a tentative peace with her wayward stepsister.
"A thoughtful look at making one's way in a world that's uncertain." - Publishers Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Food stylist Julia Daniel would love to extricate herself from her dead-end life. She's got an evil boss at her Los Angeles magazine and a wicked stepsister back in Kentucky and, at 33, she's been newly orphaned. Years before she'd left the Bluegrass State to try her luck as a photographer in L.A. (your palette, says one art director, is "at best pedestrian, at worst beggarly"), Julia Daniel watched her mother die of cancer, and she never forgave her father for his speedy remarriage. But now, with her father's sudden death in a plane crash, Julia understands that she's been drowning in sadness for years. As Norris plumbs the depths of Julia's sorrow and charts the lengths she must go to heal, she reveals that Julia's photography career was stymied by depression as much as by big-city competitiveness and that she's sunk so low that killing cockroaches makes her feel "wily and powerful." Norris gives Julia neither jaded interior dialogue nor hipster wit, and while this is appropriate for a book about grief and recovery, the novel's sorrow can feel both familiar and mildly suffocating. A tag line designating this "a novel of love, loss and food" may catch the eye of chick-lit fans, but instead of the genre's traditional yuks, they'll find a thoughtful look at making one's way in a world that's uncertain.
