Amazon.com Review
Everything about
How to Cook a Tart, the debut novel from
Washington Post food writer Nina Killham, is too much. Its heroine, cookbook author Jasmine March, is a rotund creation, a lover of cream and butter and pork and all manner of excess. Food governs her. She's given to ruminations along these lines: "of all the herbs, Jasmine thought, basil was her soul mate. Basil was sensuous, liking to stretch out green and silky under a hot sun with its feet covered in cool soil." Her husband Daniel is having an affair with a woman of the opposite extreme: an actress named Tina who's a skinny-limbed disciple of the Zone diet. Jasmine's daughter Careme is--what else?--an anorexic. Killham pushes these characters off the precipice of probability when Tina is found dead in Jasmine's kitchen, a brownie stuffed in her mouth. This could be a rich comic stew, but though Killham has a firm grasp of cookery, she has poor control over her tone. We're never sure if what we're reading is satire or romance or grotesquerie. It doesn't help that she lifts her conclusion from Roald Dahl. Still, foodie fans of
Bon Appétit-style purple prose will find much to admire in the descriptions of Jasmine's kitchen adventures.
--Claire Dederer
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Food, sex, murder and more food are the subjects of Killham's decadent debut. Jasmine March, a Rubensesque cookbook author and gourmand, is on a crusade to bring her rich recipes to the masses. She lives in Georgetown, in Washington, D.C., with her husband, Daniel, an acting teacher who's sliding into a classic midlife crisis, and their 16-year-old daughter, Careme, a frustrated virgin with an eating disorder and a pet python. Jasmine's publisher threatens to drop her unless she can come up with a low-fat cookbook, even though she longs for "the days when men were gluttons and proud of it... when food was prized, not shunned like some leprous disease," and when her so-called friends in the cutthroat food business don't help at all, she menaces one with a cleaver. Meanwhile, the eponymous tart in question is Tina Sardoni, a wafer-thin student in Daniel's acting class, who has a thing for colon cleansing and married men. The latter predilection lands her on Jasmine's kitchen floor, bludgeoned to death by a marble rolling pin. Jasmine is the perfect suspect, but is she the killer? Foodies, celebrity chefs, fad diets and skinny people all get what's coming to them, as Jasmine waxes poetic on everything from butter to bull testicles. Elaborate culinary descriptions and metaphors tend to overpower the rather meager plot, but this amusing satire will delight readers who believe that eating well is the best revenge.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
