Review: Like Water for Chocolate, by Laura Esquivel

4/5 Black Cats

I read this book for the “Magical Realism” category of Halloween Bingo 2016.

I found this book quite enjoyable. I read the book in a day, staying up until midnight to finish it off, in one of those fits of “I can’t stop reading until I know what happens.” It grabbed me and just wouldn’t let go, and I just love books like that. I found myself swept up in the drama, and the magic, and the wonder, and yes…the outrageous nature of the book.

This delightful book reminds me a bit of a soap opera. There are dramatic relationships full of angst. There is death. There are births. Like every soap opera I’ve ever seen, there is a touch of the outrageous, so you never know quite what to believe, and you take everything with a grain of salt after awhile. And, the most interesting of all, there is magic related to food. Something new at every turn of the page.

I’ll be honest, I would never make any of the recipes featured in the book. I might not even want to eat most of them. But it was most interesting reading about how they are all made. The recipes were especially interesting, because rather than just writing out recipes, the author partly incorporates the recipes into the story, so that there is a nice flow to it, and the reading is much more interesting and engaging than just reading a recipe card.

I had a lovely time reading this book. I had really high hopes for this when I found it, and I’m so glad I was not disappointed.