Book Review: Comfort Foods by Kate Jacobs

Reviewed by guest blogger Ginny Buccelli

I once spent an evening trying to bake cookies, but every single egg that I touched broke. First I dropped an entire carton on the floor. Of the few that didn’t break on impact, two fell on the floor during cleanup, another was crushed on its way into the mixing bowl, and at least one fell into the sink. I had to drive across town to borrow six virgin eggs from my best girlfriend. Ultimately the cookies were baked and they were quite tasty, but getting them made was a tedious process that took way too long.

The same can be said for Comfort Foods from Kate Jacobs, author of Friday Night Knitting Club.

The opening chapter is dedicated to Gus Simpson’s impeding 50th birthday and her reluctance to throw herself a party. Given that she is a popular TV cooking show host, and that throwing parties is what she lives for (with the exception of managing the lives of her two grown daughters) it is expected that the celebration will be a big one. The narrator shares with us the minute details of Gus’s thought process surrounding her reluctance to acknowledge her 50th, the trajectory of her career, even the layout of her home and names and personalities of her cats, Salt and Pepper (guess which one is black and which one is white). While the author does a splendid job of weaving nonessential facts into a sentence, they are still nonessential facts. The opening chapter just goes on and on.

Suddenly Gus finds herself in a new cooking show with a gorgeous former beauty queen from Spain as her co-host and rival. Just as suddenly, both of Gus’s daughters, one daughter’s former boyfriend, a hot new sous-chef and a disgraced sports star all end up on camera as well. There was one fairly spicy sex scene, it was more of an almost sex scene, just a tease really. Gus’s 50th birthday came and went and no one seemed to notice. Except for me–I felt gypped–reading all those pages of lamenting about turning 50 for nothing.

While I drew no comfort from Comfort Foods I was mostly entertained. The characters and plot eventually hit their stride even though too many juicy revelations, plot movements and character development take place off the pages. There are definitively some spices missing from “Comfort Foods,” but it isn’t completely tasteless. The characters and plot all work toward a climax, but like my cookies, getting there took way too long.

Comfort Foods
By Kate Jacobs
G.P. Putnam’s sons: New York
ISBN: 978-0-399-15465-2
$24.95

Ginny Buccelli
www.ginnybuccelli.com