I am running behind on things. “Delicious!” by Ruth Reichl was actually the August Left Coast Culinary Book Club selection. I think I found out about the book in late August and we had two books that month. I scanned through the cookbook in September and started reading this book about mid-October. I remember packing it with me on my hunting trip but didn’t make any progress.

What is different than the other work that I have read from Reichl is that this is her first attempt at fiction. To date, I have been a fan of her non-fiction as it is almost larger than life. I will remind you the Reichl was a food critic for the New York Times and dressed up as characters for restaurant evaluation so that she wouldn’t be outed.

This book has the same light, readability and feels in the same style as Reichl but is different. To me, the story meanders a lot without much of a point. I am trying to describe it without being too harsh. Characters kind of jump in and jump out and almost seems fluffy, like there was a lot of unnecessary plot line. Let’s go to the plot line first.

The book opens with the main character ‘Billie’ and her sister baking a gingerbread cake for her father’s birthday. This gingerbread is a theme throughout the whole book where she uses it to empress her potential employer in a job interview, her colleagues when they were down and anytime she wants to butter up someone for getting what she wants.

Billie is hired by the fictitious magazine Delicious! as a personal assistant to the general manager. After a short time, the magazine is closed but she is the only person kept on staff presumably because she was the cheapest. At this point, she has run of the office and the locked library where she serendipitously discovers some hidden letters to James Beard (a former Delicious employee).

The story goes on a wild goose chase of secret codes and tracking down people, meanwhile she is battling personal demons and falling in love. The whole point of all this is that Billie wants to see the whole picture so that an article can be written about this correspondence between a character Lulu and James Beard.

Maybe it is a writer’s thing, but I wonder what article she is going to write when the magazine is closed? I suppose that it could be a freelance piece, but throughout the book there is no mention of networking with other publishers. That seems a bit of a fantasy.

The story also contained some real non-sequitur parts as well. Billie meets an Italian butcher and family where she works all of her weekends. A lot of the book is devoted to this interaction that really doesn’t go anywhere in the storyline. Also, her father shows up out of the blue near the end of the book. He has been trying to get Billie to come home for the holidays for several years and yet she has refused to leave New York. All of a sudden they meet up at the same mid-western hotel when Billie is tracking information about Lulu.

It is not that I didn’t enjoy the story, it was fine but uninteresting. If I saw a book about letters from James Beard to some unknown person, I would skip it without a second thought. I certainly respect what Beard did for the culinary world, but it would seem like only a true groupy would be interested in this affair. The whole thing seemed a little forced to me.

One thing that I can say about the book (at least my version) has a section after the story about a suggested dinner party menu to go with the book. I wish that I would have known this when we had our book club meeting in August. We could have played on that theme a little bit when it came to making food.

I think that you will like this book if you find yourself turning on the Hallmark channel and getting vested with those types or movies. Or, the other type of person would be the one that fanaticizes about James Beard. You won’t like the book if you are into We or Anthem like I am currently reading. The story buttons up nicely with a few twists when you are vested in the characters.

End Your Programming Routine: Despite my opinion, I still highly recommend both Garlic and Sapphires as well as Save me the Plums by Reichl. It is not the author or the subject matter but this particular story for me. This is partially why it took me a month to get through this book, I just couldn’t get into it. That being said, it is nice to get out of the world of heavy fiction or cookbooks sometimes. That I can appreciate in this case.