The Lost Art of Mixing by Erica Bauermeister

I can't tell you how excited I was to hear that there would be a sequel to The School of Essential Ingredients.  Bauermeister's debut was a favorite of mine a few years ago when it came out.  I gobbled most of it up one morning during a snowstorm when I couldn't even be bothered to pause long enough to move to a comfier seat than my wooden chair at the kitchen table.  I also very much enjoyed Bauermeister's sophomore effort, Joy for Beginners, which made the train ride home from BEA a total pleasure.  That was great, but it was very refreshing to revisit Lillian's food-filled world in The Lost Art of Mixing.

The Lost Art of Mixing returns us to Lillian's kitchen, but things aren't going so terribly well.  In the opening pages, Lillian discovers some news that will turn her life upside down.  Lillian's accountant Al and his wife Louise are discovering maybe theirs is not quite a match made in heaven.  Lillian's former student, current sous chef, Chloe thinks she might've found someone to love in the guise of the restaurant's new dishwasher, tall, silent Finnegan, but there's more to him than meets the eye.  Not to mention, Chloe's aging roommate Isabelle is slowly losing her memories to Alzheimer's disease. 

As Isabelle wisely observes of her friends, "They were like ingredients that had become chemically incapable of mixing with each other, or perhaps had simply forgotten how, when she knew it wasn't the case and didn't need to be."  Isabelle's memory might be slipping, but fortunately, she still has a few tricks up her sleeve that could heal the rifts between the people she loves. 

Unfortunately The Lost Art of Mixing didn't pack quite the same emotional punch for me as did The School of Essential Ingredients.  I loved how, in School, Bauermeister drew Lillian as a wise lady whose instincts for which foods would re-awaken the spirits of her cooking school students.  Not only was it an interesting concept, but it proved to be a great way to unite the several different stories Bauermeister was telling.  In Mixing Bauermeister spends more time on Lillian as a character in her own right, but also explores the lives of various other characters, which is interesting, but the story is not quite so naturally cohesive as when Lillian's cooking school was anchoring it.

That said, Bauermeister's magic is still there.  Like Lillian, Bauermeister has a keen instinct when it comes to people and the experiences that shape their lives, and in her writing, she does a fantastic job of drawing out the pasts that have damaged her characters and the things that each of them need to move forward.  She also has a keen eye for the seemingly small things that can renew the human spirit - how physical labor can serve as a cleanser for the soul, how a listening ear and a cup of tea can be all it takes to set a person on a new path, and how a simple object can hold a wealth of memories.  Readers will fall in love with this set of characters just as easily as the ones that graced the pages of School, and the glow of Bauermeister's beautifully intuitive prose is sure to win her more fans.

(This is the part with the gratuitous, illicit ARC quoting.)

It made Chloe wonder, how much could you hold in your arms if they weren't full of the constantly falling pieces of yourself?

Silence didn't appear to bother Finnegan, the way it did some people, who seemed to think that airtime should be claimed like property.  Jake had been that way, always reaching for the conversation as if it was the last slice of pizza in the box and the next meal was uncertain.

Isabelle was used to surprises these days, to playing hide-and-seek with the world.  She didn't even need to count before words and ideas, faces and memories would scatter off into corners where she couldn't find them.  Sometimes they came back; other times they were simply gone.  Isabelle liked to think that perhaps some of them had found each other, had struck up friendships, and gone out for coffee, or were hidden behind the couch making love.  It was better than thinking they were never coming back.

Thanks to the publisher for providing me with a copy in exchange for my honest review.

Joy for Beginners by Erica Bauermeister

So, enough with all this BEA stuff, already, right? It's time to get back in bed with my review backlog which keeps adding up because, um, I keep reading books. Hard to believe, isn't it?

Actually, I'm very excited to be talking about Erica Bauermeister's new book Joy for Beginners. I really enjoyed her debut, The School of Essential Ingredients, so imagine my glee when Erica herself wrote me with an offer of her newest. It had big shoes to fill to follow in the footsteps of The School of Essential Ingredients, and I'm happy to report it doesn't disappoint. Exactly the opposite, in fact.


When Kate's friends come together over dinner to celebrate Kate's victory over breast cancer, they get a little more than they bargained for. Kate's daughter Robin wants her to take a terrifying white-water rafting trip, and having just dodged death, Kate can't fathom taking such an unnecessary risk. To persuade her, her friends each agree to do something scary or difficult, and Kate gets to choose.

The book follows each of the seven women as they undertake the tasks that Kate has chosen for them. I admit, at first, that I was reluctant to believe that Kate could so perfectly choose just the things that would lead her friends to challenge themselves and be renewed, but as the book moved on, and the bands of friendship between the group were more illuminated and finally, when Kate's own Grand Canyon rafting trip takes place, it all comes to seem natural and perfectly woven together.

Bauermeister gives each woman her own section of the book, gently fleshing out each character and drawing her connection to the others. Kate's wise choices of tasks are revealed, and though some seem less than challenging to the average woman, each task is loaded with emotional hurdles for characters who have struggled and who have lost or given up parts of themselves just going through the motions of life. In the process of taking on Kate's challenges, the women discover parts of themselves that they had either intentionally or unwittingly locked away, parts where joy is so tangled in fear and pain that they could hardly hope to unravel them.

By the end of the week, Sara had decided that her feet and eyes and nose were much more interesting guides than a map. Over the years, she had forgotten what it felt like to walk with the delicious purposelessness of going nowhere. But now she remembered, and she spent hours simply moving, reveling in the feeling of the muscles of her legs, the swing of her arms agains her body. She stopped only to eat, or to take pictures - the smooth brown surface of a cat mask, the light caught in its curves; the middle-aged couple oblivious to the world, sitting on a park bench, her legs draped across his lap, his fingers on her ankles. A family eating Sunday lunch, the aroma of their meal drenching the air in a scent so warm and round and golden it made breathing feel like eating.

How long had it been, she wondered, since she had seen the world like this?

That's just it, though, in Joy for Beginners, the women, with Kate's help, begin to uncover the strength, the capability, the joy they had forgotten existed. All throughout, Bauermeister's writing with its almost ethereal quality imbues the characters' journeys with a kind of everyday magic with the power to make readers smile and cry, occasionally at the same time. It's easy to recognize yourself or any of the women you know in Bauermeister's characters, which makes Joy for Beginners that much more of a personal read. On the whole, Joy for Beginners is an emotionally satisfying tale of self-discovery and the power of true friendship that I can't recommend highly enough.

Check out Joy for Beginners when it hits shelves on June 9th!

The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister

Wow, it's been a slow week in blogland for me, which is bad because it seems that everybody else is really back in the bloggy swing of things. Blogland is in full swing and so's the workload at my job where it seems like we were busier than ever this week. Every day I try to sit down and read what everybody's writing and rarely get very far before getting distracted by all of life's have tos (and a few of those pesky other want tos, too). It all reminds me of why I've always been (and continue to be despite my best efforts) a big old lurker. All this commenting stuff makes this bloghopping take so much longer. Yet it would be a bizarre contradiction if I stopped taking the time to comment in the name of getting through the posts in my Google reader quicker, no?

Is anybody starting to get the feeling that the brief personal interludes at the beginning of most of my posts with actual content are merely serving to get me into the flow of writing? Because I'm pretty sure that's why I do this. Or else I'm just dragging my feet without really knowing why. Anywho, I'm all warmed up now, so on to the good stuff...

I finished a great book last weekend and my first read that will be released this year. It was one of those books that was fully satisfying and one that I knew that I would be recommending before I even came close to turning the last page. Any book that can make me forget that A) it's snowing outside and B) I'm sitting on a rock hard kitchen chair that's really making my back hurt for a considerable amount of time definitely gets my vote. Now the irony in all this is that, uh, I don't even remember requesting this ARC. Terrible, right? It arrived in the mail, and I was like...I chose this? I guess it sounds good, but when did I choose this? Oh well, all's well that ends well, and this book certainly does!


The book in question, of course, is Erica Bauermeister's debut novel The School of Essential Ingredients. Lillian recognizes from an early age that food is powerful. For Lillian, flavors can heal, spices can seduce, and even an ordinary apple can be magical for someone who eats it at just the right moment. During a monthly cooking class at her restaurant, Lillian sets out to show that cooking is much more than simply following directions in a recipe and eating is much more than a practical action to stave off hunger. As her students come from their seperate walks of life, each of their personal stories is illuminated and each of their lives is impacted by lessons they learn under Lillian's perceptive tutelage, lessons that extend far beyond how to bake a good cake or prepare Thanksgiving dinner. Slowly but surely, Lillian's students come to discover the power of a good meal to bring people together, to heal past hurts, and to alter the course of current struggles.

She saw that cookies that were soft and warm satisfied a different human need than those that were crisp and cooled. The more she cooked, the more she began to view spices as carriers of the emotions and memories of the places they were originally from and all those they had traveled through over the years. She discovered that people seemed to react to spices much as they did to other people, relaxing instinctively into some, shivering into a kind of emotional rigor mortis when encountering others.

The School of Essential Ingredients is a briliant blend of the obvious and the subtle just like the flavors that change the lives of Bauermeister's characters. Bauermeister's writing is a rare and sensual treat as her writing brings scents, flavors, and textures to life right alongside the poignantly rendered moments in the lives of each of the characters. Each of the students is fleshed out and all are having experiences that it is easy for the reader to relate to their own life. Their stories are both sweet and sad, but above all, genuine. Bauermeister's debut is a delicious story about food, about love, and about life that left me totally satisfied, even as I wiped a tear or two from my eye.

The frosting was a thick buttercream, rich as a satin dress laid against the firm, fragile texture of the cake. With each bite, the cake melted first, then the frosting, one after another, like lovers tumbling into bed.



That's two for two on books making me cry in 2009 which is actually a highly unusual event. And I should have written this review right after I finished the book instead of now when the afterglow has worn off in the face of a week of hard work - then maybe it would not be so feeble - though it is admirably concise, for me. *sigh* I loved this book a lot more than it seems like from the review, mmkay?

The School of Essential Ingredients will be available where books are sold on January 22, 2009. And have I mentioned that it was really, really good?

Read other reviews at:

Worducopia
A Reader's Respite
Books and Cooks