Pastries: A Novel of Desserts and Discoveries [Hardcover]

Bharti Kirchner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 19, 2003

Sunya Malhotra, a young American woman whose parents had migrated from India, is the head baker and owner of Pastries, a warm and cozy bakery in Seattle. Sunya loves baking and has transformed her fabulous cakes and tarts into delicious works of art. The success of her beloved bakery is put in jeopardy, however, when a chain bakery threatens to open up down the street from her. To add to her misery, Roger, her hip, Japanese boyfriend has left her for a "perfect" Japanese girlfriend and her mother has just become engaged to a man Sunya detests. Sunya hasn't yet reconciled to the mystery of a father missing since her birth. Even a new relationship with a hot, young film director who is in town to cover the 1999 World Trade Conference, can't help Sunya with her biggest worry - she has lost her touch for baking.

Overwhelmed, Sunya is surprised to find herself listening when her new Japanese baker offers her a solution to her problems - enroll in a baking school in Japan! Of course, this isn't just any baking school. It is run by a famous Japanese baker, Mori Matsumoto, and is based on the principle of mindfulness. Soon Sunya finds herself learning the basic skills of baking all over again. Is this what she needs to rediscover herself? Will she recapture her zest for work and life?

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Cookbook author turned fiction writer Kirchner (Darjeeling) gives us a glimpse into the tumultuous life of a contemporary Seattle bakery owner in this sweet but uneven novel about family, friendship, romance and self-renewal. Sunya Malhotra, 29, is the owner of Pastries, a quaint bakery cafe in Seattle's Wallingford district. Barely recovered from a painful breakup with her activist ex-boyfriend, Sunya feels the world is conspiring against her as a huge bakery chain makes plans to move down the street, her mother's obnoxious fiance begins meddling in her affairs and the daily personal dramas of her bakery staff escalate until they threaten her business. For Sunya, the most disconcerting aspect of the tumultuous state of her life is that she has lost her passion and instinctive talent for baking. Intricate descriptions of baking techniques ("I turn the dough out onto a nonstick kneading mat") and involved discussions of baked goods ("The amaretto-laced sour cream lavished on top is not entirely necessary... but it prepares the mouth") add a whimsical element to Kirchner's storytelling, but at times their inclusion seems contrived. As the novel progresses, Sunya searches desperately for a way to regain her baking passion, unsure whether she can achieve this through a nascent romance with an ambitious young movie director or by accepting an invitation to attend a baking course at Apsara Bakery in Kyoto, Japan. Sunya heads to Japan hoping to regain what she's lost and also to learn more about the Sunya Buddhist tradition, for which she was named by her long-lost father. The ride from kitchen to kitchen is bumpy, but those who choose cookbooks as bedtime reading will savor Kirchner's baking lore.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Kirchner deftly weaves an intricate tangle and then gradually unties the knots toward the end, much like a Bollywood blockbuster."
- The San Francisco Chronicle

"The best of Pastries is the frantic life behind the serene scenes in the cafe and the menu. Brown-butter nectarine layer cake. Mango cheesecake. Creme brulee drizzled with persimmon coulis - Ok, you're drooling."
- The Detroit Free Press

"There's a sweetness to the bakery's singular desserts; while in the end, Kirchner's characters receive their just desserts."
- Seattle Weekly

"Seattle, a town where food is taken very seriously, is the perfect backdrop for a pastry war."
- LA Times

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1st edition (July 19, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 031228988X
• ISBN-13: 978-0312289881
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,335,124 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Bharti Kirchner is the author of eight books--four critically acclaimed novels and four cookbooks and hundreds of short pieces for magazines and newspapers. Her essays have appeared in nine anthologies, the most recent being Foreign Flavours. Her fifth novel, Tulip Season: A Mitra Basu Mystery is due out in 2012.

Her other novels include Pastries: A Novel of Desserts and Discoveries, Darjeeling, Sharmila's Book, and Shiva Dancing and cookbooks include Indian Inspired and The Bold Vegetarian. Bharti is a Contributing Editor for The Writer. She has written for Food & Wine, Vegetarian Times, Writer's Digest, Fitness Plus, Northwest Travel, and The Seattle Times.

Bharti has won two Seattle Arts Commission literature grants, two Artist Trust literature grants (including one in 2011), and has twice been a Fellow of Jack Straw Productions. She has been honored as a Living Pioneer Asian American Author. She is a popular speaker at writer's conferences nationwide.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars So very bad I don't know if I'll finish it, August 1, 2005

By 

A reader "A reader" (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pastries: A Novel of Desserts and Discoveries (Hardcover)

I picked up this book because I like novels that have a food base to them. I especially love baked goods (who doesn't?) so Pastries seemed to fit the bill.

What a groaner this has turned out to be. The characters are flat, the dialogue is painfully unbelievable (from the French assistant who inserts a "oui" or a "bon jour" with every third line he utters to the movie director who describes his movie to Sunya over dinner like he's reading from a 13-year-old girl's journal of prose) and the plot twists are just plain silly. (For example, over dinner Sunya is stunned when her date rhapsodizes about a hole-in-the-wall doughnut shop with silk curtains he frequented as a boy. Guess what -- it's the shop Sunya's mom opened when Sunya was a girl.)

Then, as other reviewers have mentioned, the Bakery Wars?! For someone who really isn't doing much to save her business, Sunya sure get s a lot of ink in the city's major newspaper. And when I hit the part with the newspaper columnist making note of a man loitering outside Sunya's bakery I said aloud, "Come on."

All WTO references, and those involved and inspired by them, feel forced and unsupported.

Kirchner seems to create dialogue, characters and situations just to fill in the unexplainable gaps in the overall plot.

I keep picking up the book and giving it another chapter hoping it gets better, but it has become almost laughable (Perhaps I would laugh about it if I hadn't paid for it).

I gave it two stars because there are some wonderful descriptions of complicated pastries along the way.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Brahms Concerto?, March 11, 2004

By 

Lily "fierymercury" (Los Angeles, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pastries: A Novel of Desserts and Discoveries (Hardcover)

I have 2 words: Brahms Concerto? The mid-thirties director guy brings Sunya, the main character, home after their date, and he puts on a Brahms Concerto? And he follows up with a waltz? He's 35!

Sunya, the baker and Pastries shop owner is 30 going on 55. She looks at her 20-something employees laughing in the bakery kitchen and thinks, "When I was their age, only a few years ago, I, too, was prone to spontaneous jets of laughter that cleansed my insides like a good hot shower. Lately, I haven't found much to ha-ha about. Is this, I wonder, an inevitable part of growing up?"

"Pastries" has some great descriptions of Seattle and some interesting characters to boot - Sunya's mom, Kimiko (her ex's new love interest), the new baker, Bob - but the threads of veracity seem tenuous, especially for a Seattle-born and bred 30-year old woman, like Sunya. Why does she not confront her troublesome employees? Why does Sunya not have any friends? Her mom, employees, ex, ex's girlfriend, and fleeting new director hottie don't count.

Other frustrating story elements include the food critic, Donald Smith. He concocts the "Pastry War" scenario that pits Sunya's mom&pop shop against the big Cakes Plus conglomerate, and then takes cheap jabs at Sunya's bakery shop in every column. What food critic does that? The ex-boyfriend, Roger, seems more caricature than character. And, the director/love interest, Andrew, made a bad movie once, during his "drug days." Is this the mid-80s? Lastly, the spoken dialogue between characters seems as if the same person is talking.

Overall, the characters seem to be living in 1990, when the build-up to the riots actually happened in 1999.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars so much to say so little, July 23, 2005

By 

Maureen (United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Pastries: A Novel of Desserts and Discoveries (Hardcover)

This was a funny mistake; I placed this book on hold thinking it was a cookbook. It is, in fact, a very bad novel.