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Summary
Summary
From Robin Sloan, the New York Times bestselling author of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore , comes Sourdough , "a perfect parable for our times" ( San Francisco Magazine ): a delicious and funny novel about an overworked and under-socialized software engineer discovering a calling and a community as a baker.
Named One of the Best Books of the Year by NPR, the San Francisco Chronicle , and Southern Living
Lois Clary is a software engineer at General Dexterity, a San Francisco robotics company with world-changing ambitions. She codes all day and collapses at night, her human contact limited to the two brothers who run the neighborhood hole-in-the-wall from which she orders dinner every evening. Then, disaster! Visa issues. The brothers quickly close up shop. But they have one last delivery for Lois: their culture, the sourdough starter used to bake their bread. She must keep it alive, they tell her--feed it daily, play it music, and learn to bake with it.
Lois is no baker, but she could use a roommate, even if it is a needy colony of microorganisms. Soon, not only is she eating her own homemade bread, she's providing loaves to the General Dexterity cafeteria every day. Then the company chef urges her to take her product to the farmer's market--and a whole new world opens up.
Reviews (5)
School Library Journal Review
Like Sloan's debut, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, this novel twists new and old worlds together. General Dexterity, a robotics company in San Francisco, burns out its bright young employees on 12-hour shifts and feeds them a gray sludge called Slurry. Enter Lois Clary, the company's new software engineer, fresh from Michigan, whose social life is at an all-time low. Alone each night, she cheers up when Beo, the takeout guy, delivers delicious, spicy soup from Clement Street Soup and Sourdough. He's nicknamed her "number one customer!" for her loyalty. But Beo and his brother, the cook, are in a hurry to leave the country, and one evening they deliver more than her order-they give her the family's starter for their sourdough bread and urge her to carry on their tradition. Lois enters the competitive foodie world of hip San Francisco with a recipe from long ago and the means to change her life. She also gets some help from the women of the Lois Club, who offer comic relief and some sage advice. Laced with clever pop culture references, this humorous, richly plotted novel features unforgettable characters and imparts an important lesson: you can't succeed in the modern world without respecting the old one. VERDICT Highly recommended for all YA collections.-Georgia Christgau, Middle College High School, Long Island City, NY © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
San Francisco's technology and food cultures collide and collude in Sloan's latest novel, following Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. Robotics programmer Lois Clary subsists on an unappetizing diet that includes frequent servings of Tetra Pak-wrapped nutritional gel until she discovers the delicious, restorative comfort food sold at Clement Street Soup and Sourdough, a makeshift take-out enterprise operated by two immigrant brothers. Visa issues force the brothers to leave the country, but before they go they give Lois a crock of sourdough starter along with a CD of the music of their people, the mysterious Mazg. Lois's first attempt at baking bread produces an imperfect loaf with cracks in the crust that form the lines of a human face. Improving with practice, she earns a coveted place at Marrow Fair-an innovative farmer's market offering Chernobyl honey, microbiotic lembas, and algorithmically optimized bagels-but there's one condition. Marrow Fair's manager wants "robot bread." Lois must figure out how to program a robotic arm to perform kitchen tasks that require a delicate touch. Lois also faces another, more worrisome problem: the starter has become temperamental and demanding: underfed it looks depressed; overfed it spreads, grows tendrils, and forms faces with disturbing expressions. Through narrative and email correspondence, Sloan captures contemporary work environments, current reality, and future trends. It's a busy novel, crammed with some excellent bits (how robotics work, how farmers markets work) and some bits that are just creative hyperactivity (like the biogeneration of lembas). The book offers much to savor, but like the starter it proves rich and buoyant at first, then overreaches. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A listless coder discovers inspirationand some unusual corners of the Bay Areavia a batch of sourdough starter.Lois, the narrator of Sloan's second novel (Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, 2012), works at a San Francisco robotics firm, where long hours move her to regularly order in from a sandwich shop. The place is peculiarit's delivery-only, and the two brothers who own it are vague about their background ("Mazg," they say)but the food is amazing, especially the sourdough bread. When the brothers leave town, they eagerly bestow their sourdough starter on their "number one eater," and though Lois is hapless in the kitchen, she soon masters baking so well her loaves catch the attention of her employer's in-house chef and, eventually, an elite invite-only farmers market in Alameda. Early on, the novel reads like a lighthearted redemption-through-baking tale with a few quirks: the starter seems to have moods of its own and the loaves' crusts crack into facelike visages. But in time the story picks upand becomes somewhat burdened bya strenuously oddball supporting cast and various allegorical commentaries about human virtues amid the rush to process and automate everything, including food. (One of Lois' coding challenges is teaching a robotic arm to crack an egg.) Among the characters are a collector of vintage restaurant menus, members of a club for women named Lois, the Mazg brothers' forefathers, and a fellow baker who plays Grateful Dead bootlegs to encourage his own starter. Sloan's comic but smart tone never flags, and Lois is an easy hero to root for, inquisitive and sensitive as she is. But the absurdities of the plot twists (in part involving her starter's need to acquire a "warrior spirit") ultimately feel less cleverly offbeat than hokey. "I oscillated between finding this vision totally ridiculous and finding it deadly serious," Lois bemoans at one point. But the story increasingly leans toward the former. Fluffy but overbaked. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The starter comes into Lois' life unexpectedly. She had moved to San Francisco to work as a software engineer, teaching robot arms to perform any job functions you can imagine. Her only comfort after another demanding day was ordering soup and sourdough bread from two brothers running a food-delivery service. But when the brothers are suddenly forced to leave the city, they give Lois the starter they use to make their bread, instructing her to keep it alive. Suddenly her life spins in a different direction. This inventive novel, from the author of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore (2012), is filled with crisp humor and weird but endearing characters. As Lois takes her first tentative steps into the world of baking, her loaves appear to have faces in the crust, and the starter Is it singing? takes on a life of its own. Then, after she gains entry into a mysterious underground farmers market on the cutting edge of food technology, demand for her special sourdough begins to rise. At once a parody of startup culture and a foodie romp, Sourdough is an airy delight, perfect for those who like a little magic with their meals, as in Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate (1992).--Thoreson, Bridget Copyright 2017 Booklist
Library Journal Review
In the buoyant, touch-of-magic prose that characterized his Alex Award-winning debut, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, Sloan introduces us to Lois Clary, a software engineer at an ambitious, San Francisco-based robotics company, whose life gets fantastically redirected by a sourdough starter. Lois is bequeathed the starter by Beoreg and Chaiman, proprietors of Clement Street Soup and Sourdough, who light up her 'round-the-clock work schedule with their wonderful food until they're forced to leave town fast owing to visa problems. (The brothers belong to the fabled Mazg community, a bit of whimsy that adds to the novel's charm.) Soon, Lois is planning her life around baking bread, building the perfect oven and eventually getting invited to join a mysterious new food emporium that aims to redefine how we eat. She even works out a deal to buy a robot arm from her company to help make her in-demand bread, which is significant; Lois isn't rebelling against technology but moving forward in her own way. In her quest, she gets help from a club of women all named Lois and enticingly still-in-touch Beoreg. VERDICT How many novels can boast an obstreperous sourdough starter as a key character? A delightful and heartfelt read. [See Prepub Alert, 3/3/17.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.