Our book club hurls me out of my rut

The Cookbook Collector by
Allegra Goodman

I fall into these ruts of not
reading fiction, and when it happens, it lasts a really long time and feels
like it will never end. And then there’ll be a book—an amazing, magical
book—that not only gets me out of the rut, it throws me way the heck out of it. This is one of those books.

And there’s no way I would’ve picked up this book in the middle of a fiction rut had my book club not selected it. 

Now, there is one thing about
this book that’s bugging me, but first I’m going to tell you all the things I
liked about it.

A wonderful relationship between
two sisters is at the heart of this book, and I adore that, because there are
few things better than a wonderful sister who loves you even when you’re not at
your best. And that’s fully in play in this story.

The sisters are near-opposites:
one leads a new dot-com in the days before the burst of the tech bubble, and
the other is a wayward grad student who works in a bookstore.

And this is also a delightful
comedy of manners. There are a couple of romantic relationships that evolve,
and one of them is rather a pleasantly surprising one. I’m a sucker for a
well-done comedy of manners, and this book is a wonderful one.

OK, so the thing that annoyed
me. There were some coincidences that just seemed way too pat. I know, I know,
these weird things happen all the time in real life. But in a novel, I set the
reality bar higher than I do for real life. There it is.