The Sharper Your Knife, The Less You Cry by: Kathleen Flinn

***Purchased through Barnes and Noble

Synopsis

When the author, an American journalist and software executive working in London, is sacked from her high-powered job, she enrolls as a student at the Cordon Bleu school in Paris. With limited cooking skills and grasp of the French language, she gamely attempts to master the school's challenging curriculum of traditional French cuisine. As if she didn't have enough on her plate eviscerating fish and knocking out pâtéà choux, she determines to write a book about her experience and gets married along the way. The result is a readable if sentimental chronicle of that year in Paris in which her love life is explored in great detail, dirty weekends and all, and cooking features as a metaphor for self-discovery. Some readers may feel disappointed that the narrator's encounters with French cookery remain largely confined to her lessons at the Cordon Bleu. On those rare occasions when she ventures into the food-obsessed city, the descriptions of meals are glancing at best. Although her struggles with the language and lack of knowledge about the culture lend comic elements to the story (once, trying to order a pizza over the phone, she said, "Je suis une pizza"-I am a pizza), they, too, constrain the author's culinary explorations

My Review Comments:

I was so interested in this book, especially after seeing the popular movie, “Julie and Julia”, to see a girl going after her dreams. There is such a rage in cooking right now, it makes you wonder what it really takes to become a professionally trained chef. This book really explains all the skills necessary for achieving and living out the passion of food with a beautiful backdrop of living in Paris. It was amazing to me all the history and information that you were given access to from the very private Le Cordon Bleu French cooking school. Besides, being in a foreign country barely being able to speak or understand the French language, Flinn still makes it through to graduate and she manages all this with her love life intact. The best part of this book is it really is a true story with a happy ending, which serves as her true beginning.