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Searching... Main Library | Book | FICTION SLOAN | Searching... Unknown |
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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 (1)
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.
