You know, Julia's Kitchen by Brenda Ferber is not the usual YA book I like to review. That's a really strange way to start this entry, but it's true. When I saw it in the FSG catalog and read the description about a girl whose mother and sister die in a house fire in the opening pages, I thought this was just going to be too deep and dark for me to want to deal with. But the story sounded so hopeful and so different that I figured it couldn't hurt to take a look. Well I read the whole delightful book last night (that's right, it's delightful!) and I'm happy to report that it is definitely a winner.
The set-up is very sad of course, eleven-year old Cara and her father loose half their family and their house in the fire and are left with a lot of difficulties as they struggle to cope. Cara has many questions that her father is too sad to answer and as she navigates through family and friends, all of whom love her but each coping in a different way, she finds herself lost and alone in her grief. In the middle of all this she decides to revive her mother's small in-home baking business, "Julia's Kitchen". It's through baking with her friend Marlee that Cara finds some of the answers she has been looking for and eventually, she even finds her way back to her father.
There's a lot of questioning God and the Fates in this book, which makes a lot of sense. It's more serious, but it reminds me a lot of Are You There God, It's Me Margaret?, partly because both Judy Blume and Ferber managed to create such engaging Jewish narrators. Cara stumbles through a lot of living in this book, the kind of living that we wish did not have to happen but is all too big a part of the "real world". That Ferber never devastates the reader shows how good of a writer she is. She handles an enormously heavy subject here but keeps the story brimming with hope. It's a sweet tale about living again, in spite of all the reasons why life seems so hard. I'll keep you posted on my review for this one, it should show up this summer.
