Vanilla Salt
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Written by one of the most acclaimed Catalan chefs, Vanilla Salt is a sensual and mouth-watering exploration of the kitchen and the human heart, as well as a tale of simmering passions and the need to confront personal truths. Alex is a brilliant chef, but he struggles to fill his Barcelona restaurant because of his gruff, eccentric personality and his refusal to use ingredients that trace their culinary origins to America, such as potatoes and tomatoes. When he meets the young, enthusiastic and beautiful Canadian Annette, he finds his ideas and narrow-mind outlook challenged, and discovers that they both share a painful past.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This overwrought debut chronicles the loves and losses that beset the intertwined lives of residents evacuated to an estate in Yorkshire, northern England, during WWII. The life of eight-year-old Anna Sands changes forever when she leaves London for Ashton Park, the home of Elizabeth and Thomas Ashton. A "bright and resourceful" girl, Anna becomes privy to the couple's disintegrating marriage; Elizabeth is bitter about infertility and Thomas has withdrawn into his own private grief, unable to connect to his wife. Alison's chosen omniscient point-of-view allows her to chronicle the stories of multiple characters and span whole epochs (1939 2006) which, combined with unconvincing characters, results in tedium. Anna as witness, for instance, is little more than a prop on which to hang rhetorical passages about solitude and happiness. Alison's writing is more than competent (this novel was shortlisted for the U.K.'s Orange Prize), but by summarizing much of her characters' feelings, she fails to engage the reader. This ambitious attempt to tell a meaningful story of the Second World War is ultimately as detached as the characters.
