book 33

How to Bake a Perfect Life by Barbara O'Neal
395 pages (copied from my Goodreads review - hence the references to other reviews etc)

I loved How to Bake a Perfect Life.  LOVED it.  Read it in less than 2 days.  Couldn't put it down, couldn't go to bed because I was so into it.  I've read a lot of the other reviews that say it's typical chick-lit, but I don't know what kind of chick-lit those people are reading.  This has some depth and deals with emotion and growth through generations of women.  Sure it was predictable, but whatever.  Do we read for surprises, or for the story, how it unfolds, how characters learn and grow?  Do we judge a book by the fact that it has a beginning and an end?  So what if you can tell what's going to happen - this was not a mystery novel.  There was no suspense.

As with most of the books I end up loving, I'd put off reading this after other back covers were more appealing to me.  I'm mad at myself for putting it off, though, as it turned out to be utterly fantastic.

Here is a breakdown of the plot without any spoilers:
Ramona is a 40-year-old small business owner.  She owns a bakery, or rather a boulangerie, on the first floor of her old Victorian home in Colorado Springs.  She is struggling to keep the business afloat when we meet her, as she had not expected the heavy costs associated with the upkeep of a very old home.  Ramona got pregnant when she was 15, and has a 25-year-old daughter, Sofia.  Sofia is married to a career soldier, deployed in Afghanistan.  When we meet these women, they are in Ramona's kitchen when the phone rings.  Of course it's the military, reporting that Sofia's husband, Oscar, has been badly wounded in an attack.  8-months pregnant, she rushes to Germany to be by his side, leaving Ramona to care for 13-year-old Katie, Oscars daughter from a previous marriage.  Katie's mom is meth addict in rehab, and was due to arrive to live with Sofia for the foreseeable future.

We learn about Ramona at 15, her summer with her aunt Poppy, and her life-changing friendship with a record store clerk named Jonah.  Ramona's story is told in first person, Sofia's through journal entries, and Katie's in short third-person chapters.  Mainly it is Ramona's story, but the other women have their own sides of what goes on.  The women in the story have real feelings and deal with real problems.  Don't get me wrong, if you look at my shelves I clearly have NO PROBLEM reading about women who have problems like whether they should purchase the new Prada bag or the new Tori Burch jeans - but those aren't real problems, are they?  No, those are CHICK-LIT problems.  Grappling with trust issues, learning to love, facing the unexpected - these are real life issues that I wouldn't dare call chick lit.

Do not miss How to Bake a Perfect life!  It is gripping and exceedingly well written.  Just don't expect a suspense story out of women's fiction.