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(More customer reviews)Home is a 26-acre estate in the Westchester town of Bedford, New York, where her neighbors are Ralph Lauren and Martha Stewart. But home is also three separate condominiums in Manhattan. Vacations mean Barbados. February is the annual clothes-shopping event in Milan. She drives a gold BMW X5.
And then her husband --- who has financed this extravagant life by bilking investors out of an estimated $12 million --- pleads guilty to wire fraud and goes to jail for a year.
That white-collar criminal's wife is a great character. Once rich, now poor. Once part of a power couple in a community where only couples count, now alone and scorned. How will she support her three young children?
But wait. That's no fictional character --- that's Karen Weinreb. How did she fix her life? She used what she'd learned studying literature and her experience at Random House, and wrote a 340-page first novel.
In the novel, Nora Banks --- Weinreb's stand-in --- is "the perfect Bedford wife and mother." High cheekbones. Long blonde hair. Glowing skin. An hourglass waist. Almond-sized diamond engagement ring. The icing? She's a gifted baker. "Much more Martha than Martha," a friend says. "You not only have a gorgeous husband --- you're not under house arrest."
But, really, at the start of the novel, Nora is shallow as glass. And, thus, not terribly likeable --- or is that just because I'm a guy who's often experienced women like her, at parties, looking over my shoulder at bigger game?
Nora is even less likeable on November 1st, when she thinks that the early morning knocking on the door means nothing more than overly zealous trick-or-treaters. Wrong. It's the FBI, come to arrest her husband.
What follows is a delicious social drama. Everyone drops Nora except for the kids' nanny, a bosomy South American saint who dispenses more wisdom than Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Oh, and her new friend, a sexually avaricious and larcenous lawyer who does everything but twirl his moustache. Not that she notices --- she's too busy working up a world-class hate on her husband.
If these were the only elements in "The Summer Kitchen", it would be a tawdry summer read, perfect for beaches slightly less crowded because of Bernie Madoff. Happily, Weinreb has a gift. Even better, she's savvy about people --- starting with herself.
I'm not spoiling the novel for you if I reveal there is an arc to the plot. It's a stunner: Nora realizes that her husband didn't act alone. She knew nothing of his machinations --- she wasn't his co-conspirator --- but she was the one with the hunger for things and trips and status. In his eagerness to provide all that for her, her husband --- a basically good man --- crossed the line.
The author's astonishing willingness to implicate her main character (and herself) places "The Summer Kitchen" above formulaic chick lit. Our questions thus go beyond "Will her baking business make it?" and "Will she sleep with the crooked lawyer?" to "Will she reconcile with her husband?"
I turned pages greedily, eager to find out.
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The Summer KitchenWhen Nora Banks goes to answer the doorbell very early one November 1st, she thinks it must be a group of teen pranksters still out trick-or-treating. But it's no prank—it's the Feds, who have come to arrest her husband Evan for a white collar crime. Nora's enviable, privileged life in the eighteenth-century house she'd quit her job to renovate to museum-quality perfection, is upended in an instant. The Bedford wives close ranks against Nora and her children. Nora's only support comes from her children's nanny Beatriz. The two women bond to raise the boys as smoothly as possible while Nora goes back to work. Baking has always been her biggest passion, so she launches a business of her own, the Summer Kitchen. Tempted by the offer of an affair with one of the local husbands and thwarted by an alpha wife who actively tries to shut down her business, Nora has to reach into reserves she didn't know she had to support her family and change her way of thinking about life, family, money, and romance.
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