Harry, Revised

I didn't have high hopes for my latest gym book--Harry, Revised by Mark Sarvas--but it turned out to be better than I thought. The book opens with Harry sitting in a diner, waiting to work up the nerve to ask out the waitress. We know he is late for something, and it sounds like a job interview, but in the very last sentence of the chapter it is revealed that he is going to his wife's funeral.

The book is loosely influenced by The Count of Monte Cristo--Harry even orders a monte cristo sandwich in the first scene--with Harry trying to be a modern-day Dantes and helping an older waitress in the same diner. Of course, he only does so to impress the first waitress and get her to go out with him. He wants to help, but he ends up making life worse for the waitress more often than not, by acting before he really thinks through his plan. Interspersed throughout are flashbacks to his life with Anna, his wife, and we see that, along with impressing the cute waitress, Harry is also trying to atone for past mistakes. I haven't read The Count of Monte Cristo, so I can't really tell how much this book is influenced by Dumas's classic or how effective it is, but it is a worthwhile read in any case.

The only real fault I have with the book is that it is set in Los Angeles, a city I know well, but it feels more like New York. Maybe it is the diner that threw me off--while there's a diner on every corner in New York, they are few and far between in LA. Or perhaps because Anna came from and old money family in Connecticut. Something just felt very East Coasty. But a minor hang up for a pretty good book.

The Book of Unholy MIschief

If my copies of The Da Vinci Code and Julia Child's My Life in France had a love child, it would have been The Book of Unholy Mischief by Elle Newmark. Set in Renaissance Italy, it tries to be a Dan Brown-type thriller. Luciano, a teenage orphan who has been living on the streets, meets the chef to the Doge of Venice and becomes his apprentice. Meanwhile, all Venice is atwitter over a mysterious book said to contain the secrets to eternal youth, love potions, and alchemy. Not surprisingly, the chef knows something about the book, and a network of chefs dedicated to preserving knowledge is uncovered. Like The Da Vinci Code, a juicy secret about Christ is proposed . . . although it is much less juicy than the one in Brown's novel.

While the book strives to be an intriguing thriller, the best-written passages are those describing food. Newmark's father was a chef, and her writing really comes alive when she is describing ripe produce and the melding of flavors in the busy kitchen. I wonder how well researched it is--it seems odd that some of the recipes are still used today, but I suppose it could be accurate. I hope she leaves the historical mysteries to other writers and focuses on food in her next book.

Speaking of Dan Brown, I'm about 50 pages into his latest, The Lost Symbol. It has proved to be very hard to put down--he really is the master of that genre. Don't judge . . . we all need a little brain candy!