'A la Carte' - Tanita S Davis

I’ve finally given in and realised that I can’t possibly catch up on writing full reviews of all those books I read, but didn’t review before 2011. So that means it’s mini review time, with bonus reader type recommendations and links to much longer reviews than mine:

Lainey is a natural chef who is busy perfecting her skills of invention in the kitchen of her mother’s restaurant La Salle Rouge. Her goal is to have her own vegetarian cooking show (because there's an unfilled niche for African American, vegetarian cooking show presenters) and she’s very focused, constantly making up new recipes, adapting old ones to fit her vegetarian, health conscious tastes and entering cooking contests. She has a charismatic voice that makes you believe she can achieve her goals.

Her mother actually finds Lainey a little too focused on this goal (and on her weight), because Lainey doesn’t want to apply to college and is a loner who takes part in activities, but hasn’t had any close friends since her best friend Sim became too cool to talk to her. Lainey knows that there are times when he mother wishes she could be ‘more’ sociable and that hurts her, even though at the same time she feels her mother’s incredible support behind her.

When Sim begins to push himself back into her life Lainey is unwilling to trust him, but as he shows her more of his tough family life she becomes just as focused on Sim as on her cooking. Sim takes advantage of her need for intimacy in his own need for money and a safe place to stay. Lainey and her mother’s relationship fractures as Lainey’s relationship with Sim throws her priorities and judgement out of balance. It’s interesting to see how much the story of two other important people in her life (her mother and Sim) permeates her narrative. Sim sort of takes over the narrative when he reappears in Lainey’s life and as his story gets more intense her focus on her career feels like it is replaced by her focus on Sim’s situation. He doesn’t really reciprocate her attention and so the story becomes all about Sim, because both Lainey and Sim allow it to. This could be a deliberate, subtle lesson about the importance of not sidelining your own dreams, but when I first read the book it felt as if the book had temporarily forgetten the importance of its heroines own story.

When I first read ‘A la Carte’ it felt very much like the story of Lainey’s journey towards her career goal, her journey towards finding real friendship and her story of her relationship with Sim. I still think this book focuses on Lainey’s story, but as I mentioned above, other people’s stories seep in to make this book more complicated. Lainey’s complicated relationship with her mother is also really present in Lainey’s story. She thinks a lot about her mother and is supportive of her, because she works so hard, but the two of them are playing this tense tug of war with each other which continually surfaces. Lainey feels her mother pull at her to be more sociable, to have more friends. Even though she’s not fully conscious she’s doing it and even though she only does it because she worries about Lainey, she’s putting a lot of pressure on her daughter by expressing her own worries in the way that she is so obviously interested in getting Lainey together with other kids. At the same time Lainey pulls against her mother’s worries in ways that she could actually control, for example if she took college seriously her mother wouldn’t worry about her focus on cooking. I wonder now if ‘A la Carte’ is a contemporary teenage romance, but also a book that is interested in showing the tensions that lead to the classic, necessary break between teenager and parent.

As I don’t cook I wasn’t that interested in the full recipes that separate the chapters. I did think it was a nice touch that they were presented in a script typeface on lined paper to make them look like recipes Lainey had written out. I think bloggers who bake would have fun trying out these recipes though. That’s really the only part of the book that didn’t keep me entertained.

Recommended for: Readers who like to bake and want health conscious recipes. Readers looking for a quiet coming of age story, with a splash o’ romance.

Has anyone else reviewed this? I thought I'd read some reviews of it, but can't seem to find any.