Musings of a Bibliophile

WARNING: do not read this without some chocolate, croissants or cookies close to hand.

Oh my goodness. Every page is filled with descriptions of the most delectable, divine sounding viennoiseries, chocolats et gâteaux Pastries, chocolates and cakes that can possibly be imagined. As if I didn't want to go to France enough already!

There are a few negatives. Being a memoir, the plot-line isn't super exciting - or even existent, really. This is someone's life, and the point of the book is to talk about the food in Paris and New York (or more specifically, the "sweets"), not to have cliffhangers or intense characters etc. Some of the timeline gets confused, and quite often the author goes off onto a tangent, or repeats herself. Also I would have appreciated if the frequent French words and sentences were actually translated (even in a table at the end of the book) rather than left to be understood through context. It's not hard to work out the meaning, but as I'm learning French it would have been a nice and simple way to pick up a few phrases.

Still, this super sweet book does exactly what it's supposed to. It also made me eat an entire bar of chocolate in one go, and then go out and have une pain du chocolat avec un chocolat chaud.