Christina Baker Kline The Way Life Should Be

The Way Life Should Be

Christina Baker Kline

Morrow, Jul 2007, $24.95

ISBN: 9780060798918

Thirty-three years old Angela Russo hates her boring job, but that is not why she feels her life stinks. The single Manhattanite detests the bunch of losers she has been set up with and vows to never accept a blind date again. Her passion is Italian cooking, but she never bakes anything except her sweaters. On the office bulletin board is a magazine picture of a cottage on coastal Maine that just adds to Angela's belief that there must be more to life than cement.

Surfing at work, Angela clicks on an ad Do Soulmates Exist? That takes her to a dating website "MaineCatch,". She finds Rich, a thirty-five-year-old sailing instructor living alone on Mount Desert island. She makes contact and they start to communicate. When she loses her job, she joins her ideal man on his paradise island, but he fails to hold up. Angela decides to stay and make a life for herself here. She rents a rundown cottage and starts teaching Italian cooking to excited local students as she creates a recipe for a new life.

The key to this fine character study is the Italian cooking that refreshes the overly used urbanite finding happiness in a rustic setting; in fact the story line could have reversed itself from rural to city and easily work. Instead of easily adjusting Angela struggles with the differing lifestyle than what she has lived or imagined. However, the cooking coming from her grandma's recipes bring a unique element to the eclectic islanders as the heroine makes friends due to her skill and passion for Italian cuisine even as she feels for the most part like a fish out of water. Fans will root for Angela as she learns what she though was THE WAY LIFE SHOULD BE is not, but what is the way life should be is what you bring to the table for others to partake.

Harriet Klausner