THE COOKBOOK COLLECTOR

Goodman’s novel focuses on two sisters and their lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Berkeley, California, around the end of the 1990s and through 9/11. Jess is the airy philosophy major who ends up in love with a mysterious collection of rare eighteenth-century cookbooks while Emily is an intense software entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. Their lives are touched and changed by partners, friends, trees, estranged family members, the stock market, and other connections. Ariadne Meyers narrates with an enthusiastic, if not overly feminine, touch. It works well with the sisters but less so with several male characters, who are portrayed as either growlers or slackers. Still, Meyers’s humorous embodiment of two quirky rabbis is highly entertaining. R.M. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine [Published: NOVEMBER 2010]