"Cooking with Caroline" by Katharina Marcus

 This superb book is a delightful YA novel with all the hallmarks of a classic of its genre; of a quality comparable with the works of , for example, John Green (An Abundance of Katherines, The Fault In Our Stars, Paper Towns, Turtles All the Way Down etc).

It is written by the narrator-protagonist in the third person past tense, with regular first-person present tense interjections in which she comments on the process of writing the story and her reasons for writing it, from which we gather that something terrible has happened: this brilliant device acts as a compelling hook and keeps us reading as the third-person story and its characters develop.

Wise-cracking, self-doubting, overweight Kirsty signs up for a cooking class with celebrity chef Caroline. Also in the class is Jake Deacon, the bad boy of the sixth form. Kirsty learns more about Jake's mysterious life as their friendship develops. 

A compelling read told with humour and compassion. 

Selected quotes

• "Nice word, simplistic. So much more complicated than mere simple."
• "The pea brains of Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber obviously haven’t caught up with reality yet."
• "Jake Deacon’s job description at Gull Cove was to be in everybody’s face at all times."
• "I’m just wallpaper, aren’t I? Part of the general ambience. One of the people you need for others to stand out."
• "He straightened up again, cocked his head and let his eyes roam freely over her shape, so blatantly body scoring her that it didn’t even feel intrusive. Insulting, maybe, but not intrusive."
• "When Kirsty wore an apron, no matter what colour, she always ended up the spitting image of a stout, pre-revolution, Russian peasant crone, as depicted in her year nine history book."
• "Zach and Noel were genuinely hilarious, the kind of friends who finished each other’s sentences while constantly mocking and taunting each other in the best possible way."
• "fit for a boy band member. Maybe not the lead singer, maybe not even one of the guys directly left and right of the central ornament but definitely fit for casting as the wild card on the outer edges."
• "You bestow love on people as if there was an infinite supply of the stuff. Like it’s the one natural resource that isn’t running out fast on the human race."
• "Because she understood what he meant. This was beyond the vanities of attraction. It was as real and as magnificent as life ever got."
• “I feel like I’m in some stupid Hollywood romdram without the rom,”
• "If I look out of your bedroom window I can see the same stupid sun doing the same stupid sunset routine but nothing feels good, nothing is right, everything is wrong."
• "Those are the rules, right? Either ‘I love you,’ brings the person back from the brink of death, or the words act as the final release form: ‘I love you.’ Croak."
• "A glimpse at his clenched jaw made Kirsty’s own teeth hurt in sympathy."
• "It occurs to me that writing is a lot like cooking: hours of preparation and then the finished product is devoured in a fraction of the time. Luckily, there is no washing up here."
• "It looked somewhere between a nightmarish vision of a government facility where genetic experiments were being conducted, and a really big, recently refurbished, insanely posh public toilet."

February 2022

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God