Katsreads’s Weblog

A novel with an identity crisis! The synopsis sold this as the next best thing since Marquez – has the person writng the synopsis read Marquez would be my question.

This novel is the story about the love between and young woman and a man, they cannot marry as she is the youngest daughter and therefore tied by tradition to looking after her mother till the day she dies. Her lover, Pedro is told he cannot marry her and is offered her older sister instead, he agees to marry this older sister as it means he will get to see the woman he is in love with everyday.

I’m okay with it up to there, their love stories continues with all the ordinary comlications you can imagine. Then the author decides to spice things up, she adds in a little Magic Realism (which I guess is where the link to Marquez comes in), it’s not great but passable. This novel is presented in monthly instalments rather then chapters, which is extremely deceptive and just random as it leads you to believe this may be the events of one year when in fact the story spans 20 odd years. Each monthly instalment comes with a recipe for a Mexican dish, now here is where I had problems. I can see why she would include descriptions of the prepartion that is gone into with the food, as it is a huge part of the characters life, but recipes! I instinctively skipped the first paragraph of each ‘monthly instalment’ as it simply was a list of food and the beginning of a recipe. 

Not a book I’d recommend.