The Ingredients Of Us by Jennifer Gold

I never really settled in to this book.  Some of the publishing house decisions don't actually help the reader.  I understand that the recipes are supposed to be extracts from Elle's binder but the handwriting font chosen is not the best to read on an eReader; there are clearer handwriting fonts out there that would have worked better from a reader's perspective.  Whilst it may be a lovely font on printed media it really didn't translate well to a digital format.

To be honest the recipes were just one of a litany of things that irked me about the book.  For someone who is supposed to make baking her profession the first thing you learn is that any form of baking is a science so measurements matter.  All this a handful or a sprinkling as measures just doesn't cut it and really annoyed me.  I have read a lot of books with a fascination for baking held by one the characters and they detail recipes that actually work if you wanted to try them.  I fear that if you tried any of these (except for the box pancake mix one) then you would end up with an inedible lump.

Then we have the time lapse formatting of the story.  It really does leap about at random.  One minute it is "6 days after finding out", then "nine years before finding out", then "2 days after finding out", then "3 weeks after finding out" - I'm sure you get the idea.  You really, really have to pay attention to the chapter heading or else it is very, very easy to get lost in the time frames of the story.  This is a real shame as I feel it would have actually worked better if we had alternated the romance between Elle and Tom from it's starting point and the present day problems on a more natural timeline.  It doesn't build tension for the reader as the historical timeline builds to tell us about their initial meeting, it builds frustration as you are never quite sure where and when things took place.

Then we come to the characterisations.  Tom does not have a character, he is just cheating husband.  Even when Elle finally gets her confrontation with him we never really get to hear Tom's side of things.  Now, bear in mind here that Elle runs a bakery.  She starts at silly o'clock in the morning and stays at the store until it closes at 6pm and then usually gets some bakes ready for the next day.  This woman is home maybe for 6 - 8 hours a night and you can bet most of that is spent sleeping; so I wonder why Tom strayed - any chance he felt abandoned?  Any chance he was after companionship?  Any chance he just wanted to feel like he mattered to someone?  Couple this with his desire for Children and Elle's refusal to be honest about the issue (her biological clock is not ticking at all) then you can clearly see they aren't communicating.  I am not condoning having an affair but I can genuinely see why Tom might have looked elsewhere - wouldn't you if you genuinely felt unseen by your partner?  This could have been explored but isn't even really touched on, Tom's loneliness is paid lipservice to when he tries to get a word in but he has been tried and found heinously guilty without being allowed to give a defence.

Elle herself is a strange combination of completely insecure and completely up herself.  The whole thing with her friend Bonnie's husband is ludicrous.  Seriously, he hit on you once, in a bar, when he had just started casually dating Bonnie and suddenly he has this big passion for you.  Honestly, get over yourself woman.

Can you tell I didn't really enjoy this book?

Unpleasant characters, recipes that just wouldn't work in real life and a bizarre timeline decision means it is too much work to read for too little reward.  I did manage to read it all and there are some good ideas in here and some splotches of good writing with an understanding of the human animal but it needed much more refining and better editorial decisions - the blame cannot be laid solely on the author, a good editor is vital and sometimes they need to be brutal for the sake of the story and I fear this editor let the author and the reader down.