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A review by jocelynw
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann
1.0
I disliked this so much that I thought about not bothering with a review at all, but I've decided to add to the "hated it" pileon as the basis for my dislike differs somewhat from the other one-star reviews I've seen.
My background is in food. I am married to a professor who likes Messiaen. We live in a little Rust Belt town that the _Ducks, Newburyport_ map encompasses. We are almost precisely the ages of the spouses in this book. So this is a set of experiences about which I have some direct knowledge.
As I read this, for a long time I couldn't decide whether the unnamed baker is intentionally ignorant about small details of food and academe, or if Ellmann is bad at research.
I eventually decided the latter when the baker stated that she was preparing a batch of 200 cinnamon rolls in her kneading machine, elsewhere specified to be Candy-Apple Red and of a 7-qt. capacity.
You are not going to prepare dough for 200 cinnamon rolls in a seven-quart-capacity bowl.
The mixer you'll need to buy to make a batch of 200 cinnamon rolls will not be Candy-Apple Red. It will be a commercial machine, and as such will be grey, or silver, or grey with silver, *maybe* with a plastic top housing that's red, but not Candy-Apple.
The baker refers to "cilantro seeds" and ugh, the when you're cooking with them, the seeds are *coriander*, the herb is cilantro.
She talks about constructing a wedding cake with columns, which haven't been popular for decades.
Her lemon cakes fall, which is an extremely unlikely failure for someone who's been baking the same recipe professionally for some time.
No baker worth her salt would buy store frosting in tubes.
She mentions a tubular cake pan and they're called tube cake pans.
She repeatedly talks about silicon cake molds and they're actually silicone, which the text eventually gets right - once.
You don't generally soak lentils. Some Indian recipes do, but I wouldn't expect an American who knows this little about food to be making a recipe that requires it.
The "S&D" that she puzzles over in the shrimp recipe is *so obviously by custom* "shelled and deveined" that at that point I wanted to scream.
It's apparent that Ellman has been living abroad a long time when she has the baker refer to an "infusion hob," which should be "induction hob," and a thing that Americans will call a stove or a range or a cooktop, but not likely a hob. This was one of the things that made me wonder if she's just written to be ignorant.
The whole deal with her spouse traveling to an additional job is strange and doesn't really add up. It's never clear precisely whether he simply has an additional teaching job (this would make some sense, without the flights and within a smaller geographical compass if he were an adjunct, but it's apparent that he's full-time, and that's highly unlikely if he has a full-time one), if he's consulting, or if all this travel is a cover for something else.
Additionally, the baker is not credible as a member of Generation X. Her touchstones are all wrong, all Boomer: Jane Fonda, Helen Gurley Brown, Joyce Carol Oates, for example - all people someone my age is likely to be familiar with, but less likely to be a constellation of particularly admired personalities. I wish I'd written more of these Boomer wrongnesses down, but I had lost patience with the book so badly by the point the pattern became apparent that I just stopped making notes. She does have her mention _Blossom_ once, but this character should have been greatly shaped by the pop culture of the 1980s and 1990s, and that's absent.
I feel like there must be some genius I'm missing in the juxtaposition of the baker and the lion, but that interpolation felt truly facile to me and like I was being hit over the head with the comparison between the two storylines. It also made me wonder what the inner monologue of a lion is actually like. I bet there are some nervous-ass lions out there who are not paragons of decisive, purposeful action.
All in all, I read to get away from my inner monologue, and so spending a week inside someone else's who was like enough to me to annoy me but just...off in so many ways...was not enjoyable.
My background is in food. I am married to a professor who likes Messiaen. We live in a little Rust Belt town that the _Ducks, Newburyport_ map encompasses. We are almost precisely the ages of the spouses in this book. So this is a set of experiences about which I have some direct knowledge.
As I read this, for a long time I couldn't decide whether the unnamed baker is intentionally ignorant about small details of food and academe, or if Ellmann is bad at research.
I eventually decided the latter when the baker stated that she was preparing a batch of 200 cinnamon rolls in her kneading machine, elsewhere specified to be Candy-Apple Red and of a 7-qt. capacity.
You are not going to prepare dough for 200 cinnamon rolls in a seven-quart-capacity bowl.
The mixer you'll need to buy to make a batch of 200 cinnamon rolls will not be Candy-Apple Red. It will be a commercial machine, and as such will be grey, or silver, or grey with silver, *maybe* with a plastic top housing that's red, but not Candy-Apple.
The baker refers to "cilantro seeds" and ugh, the when you're cooking with them, the seeds are *coriander*, the herb is cilantro.
She talks about constructing a wedding cake with columns, which haven't been popular for decades.
Her lemon cakes fall, which is an extremely unlikely failure for someone who's been baking the same recipe professionally for some time.
No baker worth her salt would buy store frosting in tubes.
She mentions a tubular cake pan and they're called tube cake pans.
She repeatedly talks about silicon cake molds and they're actually silicone, which the text eventually gets right - once.
You don't generally soak lentils. Some Indian recipes do, but I wouldn't expect an American who knows this little about food to be making a recipe that requires it.
The "S&D" that she puzzles over in the shrimp recipe is *so obviously by custom* "shelled and deveined" that at that point I wanted to scream.
It's apparent that Ellman has been living abroad a long time when she has the baker refer to an "infusion hob," which should be "induction hob," and a thing that Americans will call a stove or a range or a cooktop, but not likely a hob. This was one of the things that made me wonder if she's just written to be ignorant.
The whole deal with her spouse traveling to an additional job is strange and doesn't really add up. It's never clear precisely whether he simply has an additional teaching job (this would make some sense, without the flights and within a smaller geographical compass if he were an adjunct, but it's apparent that he's full-time, and that's highly unlikely if he has a full-time one), if he's consulting, or if all this travel is a cover for something else.
Additionally, the baker is not credible as a member of Generation X. Her touchstones are all wrong, all Boomer: Jane Fonda, Helen Gurley Brown, Joyce Carol Oates, for example - all people someone my age is likely to be familiar with, but less likely to be a constellation of particularly admired personalities. I wish I'd written more of these Boomer wrongnesses down, but I had lost patience with the book so badly by the point the pattern became apparent that I just stopped making notes. She does have her mention _Blossom_ once, but this character should have been greatly shaped by the pop culture of the 1980s and 1990s, and that's absent.
I feel like there must be some genius I'm missing in the juxtaposition of the baker and the lion, but that interpolation felt truly facile to me and like I was being hit over the head with the comparison between the two storylines. It also made me wonder what the inner monologue of a lion is actually like. I bet there are some nervous-ass lions out there who are not paragons of decisive, purposeful action.
All in all, I read to get away from my inner monologue, and so spending a week inside someone else's who was like enough to me to annoy me but just...off in so many ways...was not enjoyable.