Judith Ryan Hendricks

Hendricks’ second book is a departure from the cozy Seattle she wrote about in Bread Alone, and returned to in The Baker’s Apprentice. This time, the setting is New Mexico, primarily in and around Santa Fe, and instead of bread, the main themes are art, herbs, and family.

Avery James, raised in an orphanage with only an embroidered t-shirt as a memento of the family she never knew, comes face to face with a painting of her mother while working as a caterer for a prominent artist. He befriends her, and offers to tell her about her mother, who died several years before, and she grudgingly accepts the offer. Swirling around the pair are rumors, old lovers, and a collection of old Mexican women who took Avery off the streets, and gave her a home, and their knowledge of herbs.

Like Bread Alone, Isabel’s Daughter paints vivid pictures of both people and food, but unlike Hendrick’s first book, this one’s ending is somewhat more bitter than sweet.

Judith Ryan Hendricks

I was first introduced to Ms. Hendricks’ work through the novel Bread Alone, which I mostly read in a single night in a hotel in L.A. that had an extremely uncomfortable mattress. That book was warm and funny, and when I finished it, I was inspired to bake bread for the first time in years, so when I discovered that a sequel was published this year, I immediately added it to my amazon wishlist, and then ordered it when I spent the birthday gift certificates I’d amassed.

I regret to confess - I’m disapponted in the sequel. The Baker’s Apprentice lives up to all those negative stereotypes of second novels (though it’s actually her third), and while the old familiar characters - Wynter who fled her cheating husband in L.A. and moved to Seattle to bake bread, her friend and sometime roomate, the dancer CM, young blue-haired art school dropout and cake decorator, Tyler, andMac the bartender/novelist who wins Wynter’s heart - are all there, they seem pale shadows of their earlier selves, and instead of coming away from this book feeling cozy and wanting to sip coffee and smell bread baking, I feel cold and sort of hollow and unsatisfied.

If Bread Alone was a perfectly flakey croissant with sweet cream butter and bitter dark marmalade, The Baker’s Apprentice is Wonder bread - bland, spongey, and utterly lacking in color.