The Cookbook Club by Beth Harbison is a feel-good chick-lit novel based around food, perfect for a cozy afternoon of reading. I was immediately intrigued by a book club that is centered on cookbooks – the women in the club pick a different cookbook each month and make dishes from that cookbook to share with each other at their meeting. That sounds like a lot of fun!
In the club, we have three women who are all at a crossroads in their lives. Margo’s husband has just left her and asked for a divorce (and left her a run-down farmhouse to boot), Trista has been fired from her law firm and bought a bar/restaurant to run, and Aja is pregnant and in an unhealthy relationship.
The book follows each of the women as they get to know each other through sharing food together. There are a lot of mouthwatering recipe descriptions, including a monthly wrap up of each cookbook club meeting. I do wish there was more description of the actual club meetings, however; I think that would have been a better way to carry the story. Instead, we get a couple of meetings and then it focuses more on the individual women’s lives, although they do interact with each other outside of the meetings at times.
This book has a bit of everything in the way of chick-lit tropes – a failed marriage with a farmhouse to fix up with an old crush, a lost job fueling a new business opportunity, and a pregnancy forcing a young woman to evaluate her relationship with the father. Because of everything going on, it does jump around a bit, but I still found it an enjoyable light read.
In So Many Words 