Blue Plate Special: A Novel of Love, Loss, and Food Norris, Frances

Product Description Thirty-three-year-old Julia Daniel doesn't really feel at home anywhere. Her life in L.A. is lonely, and her career as a food stylist for a struggling gourmet magazine falls well short of her desire to be a photographer. Although she liked growing up in Kentucky, ever since her mother's death and her father's remarriage, her birthplace hasn't felt like the right fit either. After the tragic deaths of her father and stepmother in a plane crash, Julia's true odyssey begins. Orphaned and adrift, she tries to find her way in the world while fending off a crazy boss, a pilfering stepsister, and a looming depression.Though shored up by two good friends and an excellent psychologist who helps her work through her grief, it is an unexpected-and comically disastrous-trip to Sedona for the magazine that finally enables Julia to move forward. Returning to L.A., she searches for the strength to strike out on her own, take a chance on love, and seek a tentative peace with her wayward stepsister.Both humorous and heartbreaking, Blue Plate Special serves up an uplifting exploration of the courage it takes to embrace life after loss. From Publishers Weekly Food stylist Julia Daniel would love to extricate herself from her dead-end life. She's got an evil boss at her Los Angeles magazine and a wicked stepsister back in Kentucky and, at 33, she's been newly orphaned. Years before she'd left the Bluegrass State to try her luck as a photographer in L.A. (your palette, says one art director, is "at best pedestrian, at worst beggarly"), Julia Daniel watched her mother die of cancer, and she never forgave her father for his speedy remarriage. But now, with her father's sudden death in a plane crash, Julia understands that she's been drowning in sadness for years. As Norris plumbs the depths of Julia's sorrow and charts the lengths she must go to heal, she reveals that Julia's photography career was stymied by depression as much as by big-city competitiveness and that she's sunk so low that killing cockroaches makes her feel "wily and powerful." Norris gives Julia neither jaded interior dialogue nor hipster wit, and while this is appropriate for a book about grief and recovery, the novel's sorrow can feel both familiar and mildly suffocating. A tag line designating this "a novel of love, loss and food" may catch the eye of chick-lit fans, but instead of the genre's traditional yuks, they'll find a thoughtful look at making one's way in a world that's uncertain. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Like many thirtysomethings, Julia Daniel feels trapped in a dead-end job, unsure of what she wants from life and where she belongs. Adding to Julia's problems is the death of her mother and the more recent deaths of her slightly estranged father and stepmother. Much to her Kentucky relatives' collective bafflement, Julia works as a food stylist for a gourmet magazine in Los Angeles. She dreams of being a photographer, but her depression and her obnoxious boss prevent her from seeing a way to make her dreams come true. This charming first novel follows Julia's travels from Kentucky to Los Angeles and back as she attempts to make a life for herself. An overly expository writing style bogs down the first half of the book, but once Julia returns to Los Angeles the pages begin to fly. The book's comic moments, including a hilarious send-up of a movie star's poetry, outshine some of the more typical chick-lit moments. Marta SegalCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Review "Blue Plate Special is so smart, so wry, so beautifully written and so astonishingly observed that I want to invoke whatever rating--five stars, A-plus, standing ovation--best conveys the message, You must not miss the great pleasures of this wonderful novel and the talents of Frances Norris."- Elinor Lipman, author of The Pursuit of Alice Thrift a