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emma_victorian 's review for:
Pomegranate Soup
by Marsha Mehran
I do feel I'm being a bit harsh here. There was such lot to like about this book - I'm a sucker for a cozy novel about food, initially it seemed a lightweight derivative of "Like water for chocolate" - which is brilliant & of course you can't expect every novel to invent a new genre. There is quite a bit of interesting and quite dark material about fleeing from Iran & then her sometimes insightful & sometimes rather dismissive view of Oirland. However ultimately I found this novel really lacked the cohesion of a more successful work. The character development was poor, the pacing was awful, the story was okay but lacked direction. Incidents & characters just popped up & disappeared. There was a strange mix of fragmented past history (without much insight - neighbour mean, husband was abusive) & then silly jolly asides about leprechauns, naughty local pranksters & ambitions of a disco - which didn't really progress the story or add much dimension to the characters. Comparing to some pretty solid novels that I have awarded with 3 stars, I felt bound to be a bit cruel here.