BREAD ALONE

A dumped wife ponders where it all went wrong—and bakes a lot of bread in the process.

Thirty-one-year-old Wynter Morrison had it all, including David, her tall, blond, handsome hubby who didn’t even want her to work (not worthwhile tax-wise, says he). Well, Wynter is ready to give up teaching and play the rich-wife role to the hilt. After all, David’s a marketing whiz and a slave to his high-powered job. But when he suddenly decides to leave the rat race—and her—Wynter just doesn’t believe it. He means business, though, and it’s not long before Wynter is on her way to Seattle to cry on the shoulder of her childhood friend, CM, a cynical beauty and man magnet. CM tells Wynter that she couldn’t possibly have been happy “tooling around L.A. in your sports car and sitting through boring committee meetings and eating artistic little arrangements of sushi for lunch and giving dinners for people you loathe and spending shitloads of money on clothes that don’t even look like you.” Wynter is nonplussed, obviously never having thought much about it. Her biggest problem now is finding gainful employment. Perhaps the bread-baking skills she learned at her student job in France will come in handy? She’s soon up to her elbows in organic flour from the Pike Place Market and mulling things over when the unpleasant reality of divorce begins: Her lawyer wants to know if Wynter’s relationship with CM is, um, entirely platonic and hints that her soon-to-be-ex is likely to cause all sorts of trouble. Her mother insists that Wynter is suffering from clinical depression. But Wynter copes bravely, makes new friends, and finds true love: hunky Mac MacCleod, a vision in plaid flannel and denim. She comes up with loads of swell recipes, too, tucked in here and there for carbohydrate-craving readers who won’t find much meat in this all-too-familiar tale.

An okay addition to the food-as-metaphor-for-life genre—if not an inspired debut.