Life From Scratch by Melissa Ford

★★

Rachel Goldman is recently divorced, childless, and 35 years old. She decides to find herself by taking a year off work (can’t everyone afford to do that?) and learn how to cook, a skill she has never mastered. She starts a blog on her adventures of a single New York woman (and the men she meets along the way) and her new cooking prowess.

This novel has pretty high reviews on Amazon so perhaps I am in a minority here but I just didn’t like this story. Besides being overly cliché, I did not like the character. Rachel is whiny, needy, naive to a scary degree, and lives in a world of oblivion. She was a very flat character. The book just seemed exceedingly obvious to me, no room for mystery. Everything just seemed too much in your face and the ending quite simple. I don’t mind a light, fluffy read but this was just too much fluff in one book for me – cotton candy overload. On the plus it was a short read (less than 200 pages) and there some redeeming minor characters, saving it from a 1 star rating for me.
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I got this as a free Kindle download and read about half of it on my phone. At first I didn't realize it was fiction. There wasn't anything horrible about the book - the characters were okay, the setting was okay - but the plot and setup weren't very interesting the characters weren't great enough to pull it along. I gave up on it because there were so many other books I was more interested in reading. ( )

I was pleasantly surprised by this book, drawn to it by the cover which looked a bit fun and unusual. I eventually downloaded it because I love fiction centred around food and the `blog' tie-in aspect with this sounded a bit like `Julie and Julia' (which I also really enjoyed). It was actually much better than I expected it to be and I appreciated the Kindle price, particularly given the cost of the paperback version at the moment!

The book is told from the P.O.V of Rachel, thirty something and heartbroken after a divorce. She's tried to better herself in a number of ways, but it's when she realises that she just doesn't know how to cook that she's determined to make a few changes in her life. In tandem, she sets up a blog where she talks about life, love and food and what she learns about herself along the way might just surprise her...

This was an easy read with characters I really empathised with. I appreciated how it was set at a time in Rachel's life where she was trying to be more proactive and strong- often books like this are mired in self-pity but Ford has created a likeable protagonist who you genuinely want to see achieve her goals. Thankfully it also doesn't read like a self-help book, despite Rachel trying to discover what makes her happy! It is a decent piece of fiction with believable, down to earth people and a plot that works and moves along at a nice pace.

If you are a fan of foodie fiction or are just looking for an easy to read piece of contemporary fiction that you can dip in and out of, then you could do a lot worse than give `Life From Scratch' a go. I am also pleased to see that the author is currently working on the sequel; I will definitely be giving it a go when it is released.

*This review also appears on Amazon.co.uk* ( )

It’s the story of Rachel Goldman who is newly divorced after 12 years & is trying to adjust to her new life by learning to cook. She keeps a blog about it and about her life as she tries dating again. It’s very well done & is nice, quick read.

There was a lot about this book that I was looking forward to. I love reading books about cooking. I can't get enough of them! So a woman who learns how to cook definitely got me excited. A woman who blogged, there's something I could definitely relate to. I think the only other book I've read like that is Julie and Julia (pre-blogging) and oh, wait that was also about a cooking blog! Finally, and maybe a little selfishly, I liked the size of the book. At just a hare over 200 pages, I was looking forward to sitting down to a tiny book because lately the books I have been reading could stand to be more succinct so I figured this one would be.

Within it's sparse pages, you have a full story. Nothing is really missing. We meet Rachel, our resident cook, blogger, and struggling divorcee. When we meet her she has been divorced for nine months, is living in New York and is taking a year off from her life to find herself. This appears to mainly involve learning to cook, blogging, and wallowing in self pity. I could have done without so much of the latter although I have seen many divorces and I realize that they are not pretty and something I will do everything to avoid.

I am going to say this: there were many things that I really enjoyed about this book and a few things that I didn't. By the end the things that I didn't really started to color the things that I did enjoy and it started to become an issue so it was probably for the best that the book was short. What I loved: how Rachel challenged herself to learn to cook. The descriptions of the food were wonderful and you could see her growth from learning how to cook and egg, to a cake, to something more complicated like a full roasted chicken or a dinner party. It was fun to watch. The blogging parts were fun and totally relatable for me. I felt that they were more in depth than they were in Julie and Julia or perhaps because I am a blogger now and wasn't then I just skimmed over them back in the day. Regardless, I liked it and could root along with her successes.

What I didn't like: it was really just one big thing that started to grow on me throughout the book. Rachel's total and complete self-involvement. As her distance from her divorce grew with time she only became more selfish, not less. Wanting to talk about herself, her problems, her successes, her every waking moment with her friends and family over everyone else's needs, wants, desires and feelings. Grow up.

Bottom line, if you are looking for a quick read for those budding chefs out there, this is one that many people will find delicious. ( )