Mah, a novelist, food and travel writer, is also married to a diplomat who was assigned to Paris for several years. In this memoir, she writes of her first year in France by taking a culinary tour in which each region’s specialty is described with loving abandon.
Though read very prettily by Mozhan Marno, who employs understated, yet sincere emotion and an authentic-sounding accent, the book is mired down by Mah’s self-indulgence. Soon after they landed in the City of Lights, her husband was assigned elsewhere and we hear every self-pitying detail. Her lengthy moping is very uninteresting compared to mouth-watering description of crepes in Brittany or pistou in Provence or cassoulet in Toulouse. Another problem is that each chapter ends with a recipe, which is fairly useless on audio. Grade: B
(Read by Mozhan Marno, Random House Audio; download only; 9 hours)
