Bread Alone

BREAD ALONE: Judith Ryan Hendricks: William Morrow: Fiction: 358 pages

Going through an unexpected divorce, sheltered trophy wife Wynter Morrison leaves Los Angeles to accept a job in a Seattle bakery and be near her best friend. As she learns to live alone and support herself, Wynter finds new love with a bartender-turned-writer and a new sense of self. This is a fairly well-written story but it is as predictable as the summary suggests. Wynter’s love for baking and her interactions with a curmudgeonly co-worker give her some depth, but the bread recipes were the highlight of the book for me.

A book with a similar plot but much more likable characters and originality is Lolly Winston’s Good Grief, a novel in which Sophie Stanton moves to Oregon and opens a bakery after her husband dies from cancer.

MBC