Hunger
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Anna Rossi grew up in a home where every meal was boiled until the flavor was gone. Now, years later, a gifted cook, she finds her own appetite draining away as her marriage dissolves into blandness. Desperate to hold her lawyer husband's attention for more than five minutes, she convinces him to go on a second honeymoon in New Hampshire - only to find that, in the end, they have nothing left to say to each other.
Taking her six-year-old daughter, Sara, Anna begins a new life as a kitchen assistant in a friend's busy ski-area New Hampshire restaurant. With the help of the critical sous chef, James, Anna begins to rediscover the simple pleasures of a life lived on one's own terms - along with the sweetness of fresh blueberry jam, the salty tang of blue cheese, and the warm, comforting and earthy taste of mushrooms. But just as Anna's appetite begins to make a healthy reappearance, a phone call from her less vibrant past forces her to make an important choice. Anna's decision may change the way she has come to view the world, and have devastating effects on the flavor of her future.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Simple recipes for meals and marriages add charm to this first novel about a cook who leaves her husband for a taste of freedom, but the book never quite achieves the rich heights of the most flavorful food-inspired fiction. Starved for affection from a repressive father and repressed mother, food analyst Anna Rossi reluctantly acknowledges the collapse of her own marriage when her lawyer husband, Michael, falls asleep over her meticulously prepared salmon with salsa. An attempt to put the spice back into their relationship by taking a second honeymoon at a New Hampshire inn only serves to underscore that Anna and Michael have lost their appetites for life and each other. Michael returns to Chicago while Anna stays, taking a job as kitchen assistant in a local restaurant where James, the chef, takes her under his wing. When Anna's mother suffers a stroke, she ponders the choices her parents made as she makes choices of her own. Will she face the future with James or Michael? Will Anna forgive her mother, and will her five-year-old daughter in turn forgive her? How much is too much fennel in fish soup? Like Anna's cooking, Ward's style is simple and direct, with carefully selected enhancements. Childhood memories, such as young Anna taking refuge from her parents' overcooked meals in a neighbor's kitchen, or adult nightmares, like the dinner party that inevitably ends in a fight, show a keen sense of detail. Unfortunately, Michael and James remain stock characters, defined by their tastes in food and sex and friends, and lacking depth and subtlety. The result is a story that is less about a woman finding herself and more about sending a husband back for one with more flavor and heat.
