Customer Reviews

The Summer Kitchen

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I waited two months for this book to come out, as I read in a magazine that it was written based on the author's own experience.

While the story itself was just okay, the writing itself was bad. It almost had a Jane Austen familiarity to it (not a good thing when it comes to chick-lit, which is pretty much what this book is). The sentences reminded me of the homework we would get in grade school - we had to unscramble a sentence and put the words into the proper sequence.

Here's an example of a sentence from the book:

"I booked the trip to Bermuda so that we would have the change to talk finally alone". (I swear, thats exactly how it reads).

This is pretty much the run-on of words, at least up until the Winter chapter, which is when I decided to return the book back to Barnes & Noble for a full refund. I really wanted to like this book, and try as I might, I just couldn't. The subjects, sentences and sequences ran into each other too often. I had no idea Nora was pregnant until the third chapter. Also, on the night the Feds come, Nora gets out of bed to shut the window because it's raining. Ten minutes later the moon is out and glowing through the window, ten minutes after that, the rain is "lashing", yet right after that when the feds arrive, the sky is turning yellow as morning comes. Forget about the nanny Beatriz. First she was living with the Bankses. In another chapter she has her own apartment, yet when the feds come, there's Beatriz sleeping in her old room. And please - if I read that Nora's husband Evan told the kids that mom was getting "cross" one more time, I would've thrown the book across the room. Who uses that expression anymore?

There was also way too much "filler". Who cares about Nora's mother and step-father, or the mud on the Range Rovers. I was falling asleep by the tenth page. The language in which the author continues to narrate had alot to do with that

I really did want to like it, but I just couldn't. If anyone has ever seen the movie "Far From Heaven", in which Julianne Moore plays a 50's housewife, you will know the "language" I am talking about. If you happened to like that movie - then you will love the way the author writes.

This would have been a much better story if the author had a better editor.

If Karen Weinreb had the services of a competent editor at St. Martin's Press, her novel, "The Summer Kitchen," would have come in at two paragraphs, tops. That's how little plot there is.

She describes ad infinitum and ad nauseum ridiculous, unnecessary details. Do I really need to know that the heroine "held her son with one arm, her left, while her right arm held up out of the way an umbrella."? The entire spiel reads like the worst kind of romance dreck larded with awkward, heavy-handed narrative. Clump, clump, clump. Here comes the drudge.

According to media blurbs and Ms. Weinreb's own (revisionist?) account, she is a graduate of Yale and Oxford, having studied literature at both institutions. She was also a journalist before marrying. This is hard to believe. No journalist has ever concocted the kind of sentences Weinreb spouts, gems such as:

"Though the laugh, the day, it exhausted her." (p.21)

"Nora had been keeping up appearances for two months since the arrest when the exhaustion of the effort and of all she was now managing alone swelled to the feeling that a blood vessel would burst if she didn't rest." (p.65, opening of Winter, chapter 4.)

"... her boys' faces looked like adorable painted puppets, their cheeks and the tips of their noses blooded circles on complexions frozen otherwise white and stiff." (p. 99)

Good grief. Such is the tortured and tortuous treacle that passes for writing these days. Even in a hackneyed genre, has publishing really sunk this low?

Weinreb's overuse of adjectives and adverbs all strung together in hideous combinations that make no sense to anyone living and breathing and attempting to read this garbage interested at first though mindlessly later will drive one to drink or in some cases probably chuck said book across the room and upchuck. (Editors, please take note of that stunner and sign me up!)

One redeemable note: The book was displayed at a store in Bedford, N.Y., and one passerby insisted the storeowner remove the display, making quite a fuss about it, too. It seems she recognized herself, not very attractively portrayed, in the travesty she wished removed. Now that's a good story.

Home is a 26-acre estate in the Westchester town of Bedford, New York, where her neighbors are Ralph Lauren and Martha Stewart. But home is also three separate condominiums in Manhattan. Vacations mean Barbados. February is the annual clothes-shopping event in Milan. She drives a gold BMW X5.

And then her husband --- who has financed this extravagant life by bilking investors out of an estimated $12 million --- pleads guilty to wire fraud and goes to jail for a year.

That white-collar criminal's wife is a great character. Once rich, now poor. Once part of a power couple in a community where only couples count, now alone and scorned. How will she support her three young children?

But wait. That's no fictional character --- that's Karen Weinreb. How did she fix her life? She used what she'd learned studying literature and her experience at Random House, and wrote a 340-page first novel.

In the novel, Nora Banks --- Weinreb's stand-in --- is "the perfect Bedford wife and mother." High cheekbones. Long blonde hair. Glowing skin. An hourglass waist. Almond-sized diamond engagement ring. The icing? She's a gifted baker. "Much more Martha than Martha," a friend says. "You not only have a gorgeous husband --- you're not under house arrest."

But, really, at the start of the novel, Nora is shallow as glass. And, thus, not terribly likeable --- or is that just because I'm a guy who's often experienced women like her, at parties, looking over my shoulder at bigger game?

Nora is even less likeable on November 1st, when she thinks that the early morning knocking on the door means nothing more than overly zealous trick-or-treaters. Wrong. It's the FBI, come to arrest her husband.

What follows is a delicious social drama. Everyone drops Nora except for the kids' nanny, a bosomy South American saint who dispenses more wisdom than Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Oh, and her new friend, a sexually avaricious and larcenous lawyer who does everything but twirl his moustache. Not that she notices --- she's too busy working up a world-class hate on her husband.

If these were the only elements in "The Summer Kitchen", it would be a tawdry summer read, perfect for beaches slightly less crowded because of Bernie Madoff. Happily, Weinreb has a gift. Even better, she's savvy about people --- starting with herself.

I'm not spoiling the novel for you if I reveal there is an arc to the plot. It's a stunner: Nora realizes that her husband didn't act alone. She knew nothing of his machinations --- she wasn't his co-conspirator --- but she was the one with the hunger for things and trips and status. In his eagerness to provide all that for her, her husband --- a basically good man --- crossed the line.

The author's astonishing willingness to implicate her main character (and herself) places "The Summer Kitchen" above formulaic chick lit. Our questions thus go beyond "Will her baking business make it?" and "Will she sleep with the crooked lawyer?" to "Will she reconcile with her husband?"

I turned pages greedily, eager to find out.

Last night, I started (and stopped) reading this --- and it could be the worst-written book I have ever tried to read. Was there no editing done?

Weinreb purports to have been a journalist, have a degree in literature from Yale, and a master's from Oxford. NO WAY!!!! If she holds either of these degrees, shame on Yale and Oxford. The writing was so awkward - the way translated language can be, with words seeming to be out of order. I found myself re-reading passages to try to make sense of them....and sometimes never was able to do so. Another reviewer gave some examples and those were just a small sampling of the horrible writing.

If I had bought this book, I would have returned it and asked for my money back. This once immensely privileged woman must have known someone to have ever gotten her book published. And she got lots of press due to her personal story (hedge-fund husband arrested for wire fraud). GRRRR

I never review books I have not finished but had to make an exception in this case. If Amazon allowed zero stars that is how I would have rated it.

The blurb looked good..the cover looked good...
Disclaimer: I have NOT read the entire book. I checked it out from my library last night and found it impossible to read past page 35. The dialogue in this book is ridiculous; at one point I actually blushed in embarrassment for the author. When, on page 35, I finally read the words "la senora" TEN times, I gave up. The plot sounded interesting, but the writing is abysmal.

The Summer Kitchen by Karen Weinreb centers around Nora Banks, a wealthy stay at home mom who resides in tony Bedford, New York. On the surface Nora appears to have it all - a handsome and successful husband, Evan, three adorable boys, and a humble Nanny named Beatriz. Nora's world suddenly falls apart after her husband is arrested for embezzlement and he is sent to federal prison. What happens next is the ultimate nightmare- Nora loses all the belongings in her home, is shunned by her former friends in Bedford and is forced to get a humble job at a pastry shop. Nora also suffers a miscarriage of her fourth child due to all the stress and trauma. Throughout, Nora must deal with her anger towards her husband Evan and her own contributions towards her current circumstances.

The problem I had with this book was that it was quite boring. What should have been a riveting tale turned quite dull and dreary. The heroine Nora is not very interesting and the author failed in making her seem real. The way in which she was described was very clinical and cold. Where was this woman's heart? Although I was eager to read this book I can honestly say that I could not make my way through this book due to the fact that it was going nowhere. The character of "Fox" seemed like a joke to me. He was such a stereotype of the cheating, rich husband and the dialogue the author used for this character was AWFUL. It seemed straight out of a dime store novel. I was really surprised by the pace of this book and by the fact that there is such hype surrounding it. It was a very disappointing read. I am terribly glad that I borrowed it from my local library.

I recently read two books that take place in Bedford, NY: Karen Weinreb's novel, Summer Kitchen, and the Welch siblings' The Kids are Alright. I found Summer Kitchen to be tedious and self-serving. Full disclosure: I live in the Bedford area, but I do not know Weinreb or the Welch siblings.

In SK, the reader is constantly reminded that the main character, Nora (whom Weinreb based on herself), is not as shallow as her friends and neighbors. In fact, the impression I got was that we shouldn't hate Nora for being gorgeous and rich and married to a gorgeous man because it's not her fault that she has won the lucky life lottery. I found myself disliking Nora's morally superior attitude. I was bored by the endlessly detailed descriptions, and in fact, I forgot to finish the the last two chapters until I discovered the book a few weeks later in mislaid bag.

Once I finished the book, I was curious about how fictitious it really was. So, I searched online until I found Weinreb's first-hand account of the day she drove her own husband to prison. Curiously, the tale was almost exactly, word-for-word the same as the scene she wrote to tell of fictitious Nora's experience driving her fictitious husband to prison. That got me wondering about how much of the story told in Summer Kitchen is taken directly from Weinreb's life and if she sees herself as morally superior to all the [...] neighbors and "friends" she left behind when she left Bedford.

If you want to read about dysfunctional Bedford, NY, I recommend The Kids are Alright-- a brutally honest memoir told in the round (as if the four siblings were sitting at a table, telling you their story, interrupting and correcting one another as they go). The Welch siblings were rich and they lost it all when their parents died in the 1980s and left them orphaned. Just like in Summer Kitchen, some neighbors rose to the occasion and others dropped the ball, but I sure liked the messed up Welch kids (who, by the way, are "alright" now) a lot more than the golden-haired Nora.

Like the other reviewer, I was waiting for this book to be delivered so I could dive right in. Drat the luck, the pool was empty.

My complaints are that the author writes poorly, the editor did not do anything to help, and there is a sense of entitlement in the author's attitude that makes you want to shake her. One sentence early in the book takes a full paragraph. Many times I had to read over a section because apparently journalism schools no longer teach punctuation. Run on sentences, fragments, misplaced modifiers, it is the perfect "how not to write a novel" and might be taught as such. Shall I mention the gratuitous sex? High schoolers everywhere will be checking it out to read the paragraph. They will be left as frustrated and unfulfilled as the author. Despite her credentials, the author is not a person who loves to read. If she were, she would make it easier and smoother for the reader. We do not need to be spoon-fed, but when reading a novel becomes more pain than pleasure, the author has let us down.

I loved the concept of the book and the lessons learned. It was heartwarming and encouraging to those who may have been thru similar situations. There can be a rainbow at the end of your tragedy!....the book was entertaining, but I could have done without the 'coat room' scene....the character Fox was ridiculous. Nora seemed cold and one dimensional. One minute she lost her baby...the next she is fantasizing about some macho sleezebag whom she never liked to begin with. The story was appealing, but the writing was mediocre...

I was intrigued by the blurb on the back of the book and by the fact that this book was an "international best seller". I also love to bake. So what's not to love? Although the storyline is appealing, the writing is abysmal. I agree with a previous reviewer who is appalled that the author attended both Yale and Oxford. The writing seems to be a bad translation from Spanish, given the awkward structure of many of the sentences. I won't read/buy her next book!