New York Times bestselling author Beth Harbison whips together a witty and charming–and delicious–story about the secrets we keep, the friends we make, and the food we cook. MUST LOVE BUTTER: The Cookbook Club is now open to members. Foodies come join us! No diets! No skipping dessert! Margo Everson sees the call out for the cookbook club and knows she’s found her people. Recently … for the cookbook club and knows she’s found her people. Recently dumped by her self-absorbed husband, who frankly isn’t much of a loss, she has little to show for her marriage but his ‘parting gift’—a dilapidated old farm house—and a collection of well-loved cookbooks
Aja Alexander just hopes her new-found friends won’t notice that that every time she looks at food, she gets queasy. It’s hard hiding a pregnancy, especially one she can’t bring herself to share with her wealthy boyfriend and his snooty mother.
Trista Walker left the cutthroat world of the law behind and decided her fate was to open a restaurant…not the most secure choice ever. But there she could she indulge her passion for creating delectable meals and make money at the same time.
The women bond immediately, but it’s not all popovers with melted brie and blackberry jam. Margo’s farm house is about to fall down around her ears; Trista’s restaurant needs a makeover and rat-removal fast; and as for Aja, just how long can you hide a baby bump anyway?
In this delightful novel, these women form bonds that go beyond a love grilled garlic and soy sauce shrimp. Because what is more important in life than friendship…and food?
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I wish that there was a cookbook club near me. I would love to try to make new reciepes and share them as well with friends. This book was a delight to read.
Really enjoyed this read! The characters are fun , realistic and delightful to get to know as they get to know each other , through the love of cooking . Each character has their own story , they come together through fun recipes each month . I really hope this turns into a series , would love to see these ladies again ..
The title of this book and it’s cover caught my attention. I would categorize this book as Women’s Lit. I expected a great read. I was a bit surprise at some of the language used early on. I wasn’t sure I wanted to finish with language like that. However, that was an anomaly. That type of language was only used about 3 times.
The story is about 3 very different women, each with their own issues and challenges. Margo is in the process of a divorce, Aja has boyfriend problems, and Trista has left a lucrative job as a lawyer. I enjoyed reading the different perspectives and how the women all pulled together to help support each other. Their acquaintance starts with a cookbook club and only grows stronger.
It is easy to read and is very engaging. I like the characters and the style of writing.
Thanks to Goodreads Giveaways for the opportunity to read this book and offer my honest review.
I love books about friends and the bonds of frienship and this book gave me all that. It’s the story of three women who bond over their love of food and cooking. While each of the women have obstacles they need to overcome they soon find they are not alone. They are all helping each other. This is a wonderful read! I heppily recommend it!
The Washington D.C. area
Margo loves to cook. In order to help her mother prepare healthy meals for her father who had had a heart attack, she started a small YouTube channel making videos of her preparing healthy food for him. It has helped her Mom and several of their friends have subscribed to it as well. Margo isn’t doing this for huge recognition but simply to keep her Dad healthy. In addition, Margo’s husband is a health nut and insists that she cook super healthy food for him. So, she does her best to accommodate his requests until one day he comes home to tell her he is moving to the West Coast and leaving her.
Trista was once an attorney, but now she runs a bar that she is working hard to make successful. As she loves to cook, she enjoys experimenting with different dishes that will entice her customers to try.
Aja has been dating Michael, a wealthy man. After a few months, she realizes that he is pretty much a jerk. When she asks to meet his mother, the woman comes off as aloof to her. But Aja does not put up with arrogant people. As she ends her relationship with Michael, she realizes that she is pregnant and also manages to get a job as a sort of gardener for Michael’s mother. Aja loves to try her hand at cooking but she loves to eat even more.
Via Trista, the three women meet up to form a type a Cookbook Club where they chose a cookbook and then made dishes from it and then they later meet to share the food.
There is much more to the story that intertwines the characters with others to make for more things happening in their lives. The author means for the book to be light-hearted with a few serious things thrown in. This works fairly well, but some of the things that happen found me rolling my eyes. I liked all of the characters, Margo especially, and I hope readers will enjoy the book. I do admit that as I also love to cook, I was intrigued by some of the recipes.
Copy provided by NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.
Thank you NetGalley, William Morrow Books, and Harper Audio for the complimentary digital and audiobook copies of this book.
I loved everything about The Cookbook Club by Beth Harbison. As a reader my two favorite types of novels are a heavily character driven book and romance. This book combines the best of both worlds into a truly enjoyable book. Add in a lot of delectable food and I was sold. If I had to peg a genre for this one I’d put it under women’s literature.
The book tells the story of three women, Margot, Aja, and Trista, who are all at a crossroads in their lives and end up meeting as part of an Instagram group meet up pot luck. The story switches between the three women telling each of their stories. Margot is a newly divorced woman still reeling from her husband’s abandonment. Aja is the youngest of the three struggling with a difficult boyfriend and other life difficulties (no spoilers). Trista is a lawyer turned bar owner, who also loves to cook. As the story weaves through the three women’s lives you get to learn their hopes, fears and troubles and watch all three work through their relationship issues.
This book is a slow journey as you get to know the women and along the way are exposed to all kinds of lovely food. I particularly like how the author focuses on particular cookbooks and dishes from those cookbooks.
I’d highly recommend this book to people who loved character driven novels with a dash of romance thrown in. If you like faster paced action, this book may not be the best choice. That being said I was hooked from the start as each character leads a very different life with various challenges and life circumstances. Steam wise this was a closed door romance which really revolves more around the three women then the romance.
Overall this is the type of book I love and I give it a big thumbs up.
When Margo’s husband leaves her to move to San Francisco for a work promotion, one which he never even discussed with her, she goes into a funk. Part of which is brought on by her changing all aspects of her life including her cooking and eating style. At her lowest point she sees an advertisement for a club to read and try recipes that they share at a monthly meeting.
Trista a former lawyer turned bar owner is using the group to test run a menu upgrade for her bar. Aja rounds out the group. She is a single yoga instructor with a huge Appetite who can not cook.
These ladies quickly form friendships that help each cope with life’s curveballs. I love when women solve their own problems. A good love story is ok when I am in the mood but strong women overcoming problems helps bolster my attitude whenever I read about them. I believe these stories also put the notion that women cannot be friends to rest.
This is a well thought out story line with relatable characters. So much so I log for a cookbook club of my own.
This book is yet another reason I adore this author! The story is about 3 very different women who without their collective love of food might never have otherwise connected. Each one is at a crossroads having seemingly lost it all. Margo has lost a marriage, that in truth was not much of a marriage at all for he was a colossal vapid narcissist. He never deserved her and when he left, he left her a money pit of a piece of property while laughing his obnoxious butt off. He is the reason women want revenge on their exes!! Trista lost her high powered law career and was ready for the next chapter that included reopening a bar/restaurant and the Aja was a timid, shy woman who had little to no self worth as she was reminded daily by her wealthy jerk of a boyfriend that she wasn’t worthy, who was all about him and never accepted any form of responsibility or anything that required him to be an adult. Trista puts out a call for for others to form a cookbook club so she can test recipes for her new restaurant. And so begins the journey of strangers to friends to wonderful support system as they each learn to love themselves and move forward towards better, happier and more fulfilled lives. A fun, lovely heartfelt sweet funny read.
Reeling from her divorce out of the middle of nowhere, Margo decides to join a cookbook club where she makes new friends, and is given the chance of second love.
I love reading about food, so, when I saw The Cookbook Club and read it was about three women becoming friends, I jumped on it. Female friendship and food? It’s kind of a match made in heaven for me. I was also really curious to see how long Aja could hide her pregnancy. In some ways, this book was what I expected it might be, but, in other ways, it was very different and I’m stuck feeling a little indifferent even though my heart really wants to love this book.
The Plot: More of a Sweet Romance
It’s an ordinary day for housewife Margo, who loves to cook and make YouTube videos of healthy recipes for her parents and their senior citizen community, until her husband walks in and announces he’s moving across the country without her. Stuck with no idea how to support herself, and with her ex-husband’s late grandparents’ dilapidated farm house, she signs up for a new cookbook club, hoping to put her numerous cookbooks to good use. And she had the book.
Trista was a lawyer, but now runs a crumbling bar/restaurant. Desperate to turn things around, she starts a cookbook club to try out new recipes. Only Margo and a young woman called Aja show up, but the three become quick friends. They support each other as Trista’s business struggles, Margo deals with an old crush who is now renovating the dilapidated farm house, and Aja wonders how long she can hide her pregnancy from her wealthy boyfriend and his snobby mother.
I loved the idea of three women forming a cookbook club and trying out new recipes. Female friendship is the one thing I look for in women’s fiction, so I loved that this book involved three very different women somehow coming together and becoming friends. But it also branches out so each woman’s story is told. I liked that the reader gets to know each woman, her history, and what she’s trying to do with her life. It was fun seeing them interact, but, unfortunately, the story kept them apart most of the time.
As much as I wanted to love this story, there were several things that disappointed me. For one, the actually cookbook club was barely seen. There were some meetings, but most them came in the form of snippets at the end of each part. Most of the story was focused on Margo, which makes sense if this goes on to be a series, especially since there are men in Trista’s and Aja’s lives, but only Margo’s love interest gets his own chapters, making the rest of them feel irrelevant. Instead of feeling like women’s fiction, much less a cookbook club, it felt like a romance where the heroine just happens to have a couple of new friends to make the story longer. The story also moved way too fast. The chapters were short, the ending sudden, making me wonder if the whole purpose of the book was to just talk about food, because there’s an awful lot of food in such a fast story.
The Characters: Three Women, Plus a Few Men
As disappointing as the story was, I did really like the characters. Most of them are in their late twenties to early thirties, so it was a little easier for me to identify with them. They were a lot fun and they each had their moments that made them feel human, but there ended up being some thin threads that wound them together that felt a little weak. Each woman was able to stand on her own, perhaps a little too much, because their reliance on each other felt more like token gestures than a genuine need for female support.
I loved all of the women. My favorite, though, was Margo. I identified the most with her, especially since she married in her early twenties just like I did, and sometimes those “what if” thoughts are hard to dispel. I loved her enthusiasm for food and cooking, and can’t help but admire the well-stocked kitchen she has. It’s kind of my dream kitchen. I really liked Aja, too. She’s younger, so came off as more innocent, though she managed to get herself into an interesting pickle as she tried to develop her voice and let her needs and wants be known. I loved that her arc wasn’t so focused on romance, but on a young woman finding her own feet. Then there’s Trista, who was a lot of fun and enthusiastic. She made some rather interesting choices throughout the book, but it made her feel like one of those overly enthusiastic humans who rush headlong into things and hope for the best. And then there’s Lucinda, an older woman Aja comes to know, who was utterly fascinating and had a rich, deep history.
I’d like to say I liked the guys in the story, too, but we only really get to know one: Margo’s love interest, Max. He had an interesting story, but so much of his life in the story was taken up with mooning over Margo that it made him feel one dimensional and not as interesting as I would have expected. There are also a couple of guys in Trista’s life. It felt like they were building up to something, and then the book just ended. They seemed nice, but, as a reader, I felt like I was being held at a distance from them.
The Setting: Washington, D.C-ish
Most of The Cookbook Club is set in the Washington, D. C. area, but, by the end of the book, I’d completely forgotten. There was a strong suburban feel to it, a bit of a rural feel since the old farm house was extremely isolated, and no real big city feel to it. I don’t actually recall any landmarks of D. C. making their way into the story. I got the feeling where the story takes place was irrelevant and had enough of a mix to make the story make sense.
Overall: Cute, but Little Substance
The Cookbook Club is cute and has a wonderful idea behind it, but there was almost too much food and not enough substance. I liked that Margo, Trista, and Aja each had their own problems and were occasionally dependent on each other, but everything was just too easily solved for them so there was almost no tension in the story. It all felt almost storybook perfect. There were also some inconsistencies, little details that changed that made the story a little jarring. This story sounded so good and extremely delicious, but it disappointed in how easily everything happened, how rushed the ending was, and how it felt like the first in a series without touting itself as such.
Thank you to Netgalley and William Morrow Paperbacks for a free e-copy. All opinions expressed are my own.
Beth Harbison is such a gem! I was so excited to see this new release. The Cookbook Club is such a charming story about friendships as well as cooking. Margo’s ex-husband left her the “gift” of an old farm house filled with cookbooks. During this time she forms strong bonds with Aja and Trista who both have problems and secrets of their own. Loved reading about these ladies and their stories. A very heartwarming and feel good book!