HOW TO BAKE A PERFECT LIFE - Barbara O'Neal
Perfect 10
Bantam Books (Trade Paperback)
ISBN: 978-0-553-38677-6
January 2011
Women's Fiction

Colorado Springs, Colorado - the Present

In HOW TO BAKE A PERFECT LIFE, the sourdough starter, or mother dough that Louise Boudin saved from the San Francisco fire in 1906 holds ties to the lives of her female descendants. Ramona Gallagher's Grandmother Adelaide left her the house and the starter. Ramona's plight with her family, who kept her ex-husband on at their restaurant business when she divorced him, impelled her to open her own business. She decides to open a bakery on the first floor of the old Victorian house, and her breads are baked using the Boudin starter. The bakery is failing due to the economy, although it has many devoted customers.

Ramona became pregnant at fifteen, which created the first rift with her family. Her mother sent her to spend the summer with her Aunt Poppy, and that left Ramona feeling ashamed and abandoned. However, during that summer she developed a love for classical music, baking bread, and for her unborn child. Between her aunt and the influence of a young man with his own issues, Ramona found the strength to make the tough decision to keep her baby against her mother's opposition. She named her daughter Sofia.

Now, more than two decades later, a phone call informs Sofia that her husband, Oscar, has been badly burned when his truck hit an IED in Afghanistan . She asks her mom to take care of her thirteen-year-old stepdaughter. Katie has been with her mother since Oscar's deployment, but his ex has been ordered to enter an El Paso rehab facility for her Meth addiction. While Sofia flies to Oscar's bedside, Katie comes to Colorado Springs . Katie has taken care of her mother rather than been taken care of. Her mother left her hungry and in horrible rooms in bad neighborhoods, yet being torn from everything she knew to live with a stranger makes a difficult change. In many ways Ramona is the one woman who can identify with Katie.

I loved this story with its analogy of sourdough starter to the emotional entanglements between mothers and daughters, and the problems found in today's society. Four generations of women become involved in this story, all of them good women, all of them people who made mistakes. They include Grandmother Adelaide, Lily, Aunt Poppy, Ramona, Sofia, and Katie. It's about love, understanding, acceptance and forgiveness. Each character's personality shines.

This story had me from the introduction about sourdough. As a baker with my own starter, how could I not love a story about a woman who loves baking and gardening, set in a city where I once lived, and includes bread recipes to boot? Despite this, the Perfect 10 is offered on the story's qualities alone, and is a wonderful way to begin the year.

Robin Lee