In the Kitchen: A Novel Review

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(More customer reviews)Here's my dilemma. Based on In the Kitchen, Monica Ali clearly is a talented writer with an eye for detail and a rare gift for turning a phrase and expressing insights in fresh ways. At the same time, she's produced a novel that is too often a slog and painful to read. There are so many characters, it's hard to keep track of them (particularly all the kitchen staff), and few are especially likable; none are especially engaging. (In 436 pages, I didn't get emotionally involved with any of them--not even the pathetic waif the protagonist takes in or the kitchen crew whose back stories veered from the horrific to the banal.)
The plot just creeps along for 4/5 of the book, until close to the end, when the main character, Gabe, begins to self-destruct in earnest, but by then I just yawned and kept asking, "What is he doing now, and why?" Ali has a tendency to digress into lengthy philosophical discussions with little or no bearing on the plot, and then keep hammering long after her character has made his point. She has an almost obsessive fascination with detail--way, way too much detail--which bogs down the plot, such as it is. More than once I seriously considered just casting the book aside and moving on to the next one in my stack. In the end I finished it, but only just.
So my dilemma: How to rate a book that's so obviously flawed but where the author is so obviously talented? If I could give half-stars, this would probably be three and a half, if only in appreciation for Monica Ali's extraordinary way with words and her extensive knowledge of how restaurants work. I haven't read Brick Lane or seen the movie, so I can't speak to whether In the Kitchen is just a sophomore slump. But I will say that she sure could have used a better editor.

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