Today's book I am reviewing is My Life in France
It is under the category: Food Memoir
This is the story of Julia Child and her time she spent in France. She arrived in France in 1948 with her husband, Paul, when he was stationed there as part of government work. She spent her time there becoming a local - learning the language, shopping at the local markets, and really finding her passion for cooking. She attended classes at the famous Cordon Bleu cooking school and become obsessed with recipes and cooking French food. She is the author if the cookbooks Masting the Art of French Cooking I and II. The book goes through her 50 years of marriage to Paul and all the places they lived until his death in 1994 and hers in 2004.
I did enjoy this book. I have always been facinated with Julia Child - her unusual voice and tall stature. This tells many little anecdotal stories about her friends, their apartments, the cities and countries she lived in over the course of her marriage. She lived in several places in France (and eventually built a vacation home there later in life), but also in Germany and Oslo before returning to the United States. She talked about her relationship with her mother (who died when Julia was young) and her father (who was a very conservative Republican - the opposite of Julia), her sister and brother, and of course, her husband. The book does jump around a bit.....didn't love the flow in some places. She would be telling a story and then quickly switch channels. But those were few and far between, and I greatly enjoyed reading about how she became the famous chef she was.
I visited France two summers ago with my family, and we spent 10 glorious days in Paris. We loved the city right from the start, and this book made me long to go back.
And it made me hungry.
Check it out. 4 stars
I loved this book! I read it this year, too. Julia Child had so much spunk, such a sense of adventure. I'm a picky toddler about eating, though, so it definitely didn't make me hungry for the food she was cooking. :)
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