Hungry Woman in Paris [Paperback]

Josefina López (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 9, 2009

A journalist and activist, Canela believes passion is essential to life; but lately passion seems to be in short supply. It has disappeared from her relationship with her fiancé, who is more interested in controlling her than encouraging her. It's absent from her work, where censorship and politics keep important stories from being published. And while her family is full of outspoken individuals, the only one Canela can truly call passionate is her cousin and best friend Luna, who just took her own life.


Canela can't recover from Luna's death. She is haunted by her ghost and feels acute pain for the dreams that went unrealized. Canela breaks off her engagement and uses her now un-necessary honeymoon ticket, to escape to Paris. Impulsively, she sublets a small apartment and enrolls at Le Coq Rouge, Paris's most prestigious culinary institute.


Cooking school is a sensual and spiritual reawakening that brings back Canela's hunger for life. With a series of new friends and lovers, she learns to once again savor the world around her. Finally able to cope with Luna's death, Canela returns home to her family, and to the kind of life she thought she had lost forever.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Screenwriter Lopez ventures into fiction with her abysmal chronicle of a depressed journalist who learns to cook while attempting to find herself in Paris. After calling off her engagement and after her cousin Luna's suicide, Canela begins losing it, but comes out of her funk once she decides to use her honeymoon tickets to Paris. Upon hearing that she can extend her stay by attending culinary school, Canela signs up, and soon she's in the sack with her class translator, as well as a handful of strangers and chefs. Canela also reflects on her childhood as an illegal immigrant and her status as a woman and once-again foreigner. Mixed in are a number of clunky digs against the Bush administration. Lopez has a hard time making the elements fuse, and her narrative is choppy and amateurish, with scenes swinging from frantic kitchen action through dreamy philosophizing to graphic sex and back. Often mentioned are the famous expat writers who made their names in Paris, but this work is far below theirs. (Mar.)
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From Booklist

Lopez, acclaimed playwright and screenwriter known best for Real Women Have Curves (2002), offers readers a scintillating tour of Paris through the eyes of Canela, a Mexican-American journalist who has grown disillusioned with her home. After the suicide of her beloved cousin Luna, Canela breaks off her engagement with Armando, a handsome doctor, and decides to go on their honeymoon in Paris on her own. She meets up with her friend Rosemary there, and after a family tragedy sends Rosemary back to the United States, Canela decides to stay in Rosemary’s apartment and seek temporary French citizenship. She enrolls in the famous Le Coq Rouge cooking school to see if she can finally master the art of cooking while she tries to figure out where her future lies. While her culinary skills are being sharpened, Canela’s senses are awakened in other ways by class translator Henry, a Brit who offers to be her “erotic guide” through Paris. Lush and sensual, Lopez’s first novel is as rich as a meal at a four-star restaurant. --Kristine Huntley

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing; Original edition (March 9, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0446699411
• ISBN-13: 978-0446699419
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.8 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,143,587 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars A teenager's excuse for porn July 4, 2009

By B. Seifried

Format:Paperback

I won this book in a giveaway and hoped it would be one of those "journey to self-discovery" books, filled with poignant scenes of Paris and the culinary world. I'm extremely disappointed to say that if that's what you're looking for, look elsewhere.
The world of hispanic/latino literature has enough uphill battles to climb without producing sludge like this.
The author apparently is unable to fashion anything more grammatically complex than a simple subject-verb-object sentence, and the subject of every sentence is "I". The poignant scenes? Pointless sexual encounters that do nothing to advance the plot or give insight into characters.
Spend your money on something else. The world has enough of this tripe.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars One of the worst books I've ever read May 18, 2009

By Andarte M. Streips-Phillips

Format:Paperback

I was excited to recieve this book for Mother's day, but when I read it, I saw that the writing is juvenile, at best, and I'm not really sure how this author got published. My hint should have been on the front cover where it says, "Honest and wise" -- Los Angeles Times on Real Women Have Curves, NOT on Hungry Woman in Paris.
Save your money and buy another book.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars A waste of time and trees July 15, 2009

By Sarah L. Wallace

Format:Paperback

Josefina Lopez may be a brilliant screenwriter but her fiction, to put it frankly, sucks. A Hungry Woman in Paris definitely had potential, but the promising plot is ruined by weak, juvenile, clumsy writing. The characters are more caricatures of chicanos than real people - none of them are endearing, not even the heroine herself. Also, what could have been an "erotic tour of Paris" was worse than stale. The perfunctory descriptions of romance left me disgusted. What I hated most about the book were the commentaries on the Iraq War. While I completely sympathize with Lopez's views in this book and thought exactly the same during the time period in which this novel is set, even my most private and jumbled thoughts were more eloquent that the poorly constructed sentences she has plopped onto page after page.

This book should have never been printed, and had Lopez and her editors not been trying to tag along from with the success of "Real Women Have Curves," I'm sure it never would have been published.