Title:
The Recipe Club
Author: Andrea Israel, Nancy Garfinkel
ISBN: 0982349203
Pages: 400
Release Date: October 1, 2009
Publisher: Polhemus Press
Genre: Fiction
Source: FSB Media
Rating: 3 out of 5 Bookworms
Loyalty, loss, and the ties that bind. These are the ingredients of The Recipe Club, a "novel cookbook" that combines an authentic story of friendship with more than 80 delicious recipes.
Lilly and Val are lifelong friends, united as much by their differences as by their similarities. Lilly, dramatic and confident, lives in the shadow of her beautiful, wayward mother and craves the attention of her distant, disapproving father. Val, shy and idealistic—and surprisingly ambitious— struggles with her desire to break free from her demanding housebound mother and a father whose dreams never seem to come true.
In childhood, "LillyPad" and "ValPal" form an exclusive two-person club, writing intimate letters in which they share hopes, fears, deepest secrets—and recipes, from Lilly's "Lovelorn Lasagna" to Valerie's "Forgiveness Tapenade." Readers can cook along as the friends travel through time facing the challenges of independence, the joys and heartbreaks of first love, and the emotional complexities of family relationships, identity, mortality, and goals deferred.
The Recipe Club sustains Lilly and Val's bond through the decades, regardless of what different paths they take or what misunderstandings threaten to break them apart . . . until the fateful day when an act of kindness becomes an unforgivable betrayal.
Now, years later, while trying to recapture the trust they've lost, Lilly and Val reunite once more—only to uncover a shocking secret. Will it destroy their friendship, or bring them ever closer?
Two little girls grow up together as good friends and pen pals, growing their relationship through letters and creating an exclusive club they call The Recipe Club. As the years go by and they grow from childhood to adulthood, the girls share their frustrations and emotions, and corresponding recipes, through letters as children and then through emails as adults. The two main characters of the story, Lilly and Val, are as opposite as they come. Lilly is a beautiful, precocious, curious girl who lives for the moment and idolizes her glamorous (but philandering) mother. Val is plain, shy, very intelligent and loyal to Lilly almost to a fault. Through the years of their being friends and pen pals they share their most intimate secrets, worries, joys and questions about life and the dysfunctions of each of their families. However, it is their familial dysfunctions that tear the two girls apart and threaten to divide them forever.
The Recipe Club is nicely written, capturing the voices of the girls as they grow from awkward pre-teens to mature women. However, the story itself, while good, lacks a bit of depth. The scandal that threatens to tear the girls apart seemed a little far-fetched and blown a bit out of proportion, but the over-dramatization of the situation seems fitting for Lilly who becomes quite the shallow drama queen. The most interesting aspect of this book, though, was the variety of recipes interspersed throughout. Each recipe means something to the girl who shares it depending on whether she is feeling joyful, fretful, angry or in love. The recipes look delicious and beg to be tried out in real life!
While the story of The Recipe Club could have been better, the concept of the book, combining a tale of friendship with a good amount of real recipes, was surprisingly fun. Though I may never read the story again, I will certainly refer to The Recipe Club when I am in the kitchen looking for something new to try and I will inevitably remember the story of Lilly and Val.
