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The Kitchen Front

Jennifer Ryan

Buy This Book

Jennifer Ryan’s The Kitchen Front is a wonderful, charming tale about the healing power of friendship and how we best learn to stand on our own by first learning to lean on those who love us.

One of the biggest challenges facing the home front in Britain during the Second World War is food shortages. With severely limited cooking staples people arehaving to get extremely creative to put a decent dinner on the table. The government’s solution is a radio program called The Kitchen Front, designed to help home chefs create meals which work around food rationing. One of the hosts is a popular male radio personality. The BBC decides to hold a cooking competition to find the best possible female co-host for the broadcast, unleashing a serious conflict among four women in a small village who are each determined to get the job.

Since her husband’s death in combat Audrey has had her hands more than full. Her three boys feel their father’s loss keenly, and comforting them as well as feeding and clothing them is a full time job. Just to keep a roof over their heads, she’s had to borrow money from her sister Gwen – with whom she doesn’t get along and who takes every opportunity to berate, undermine and belittle Audrey. The only thing keeping Audrey’s small family afloat are the pies, cakes and other delicacies she bakes to bring in a few extra pennies per week. Being co-host of The Kitchen Front would be a huge boost to her business and her coffers.

Housemaid/kitchen girl Nell despises working for Lady Gwendolyn (Gwen) Strickland, a complete shrew who overworks and underpays her staff. Winning the competition will allow Nell to leave the isolated estate where she works, meet people – hopefully at least a few of them handsome single men – and establish a new career which doesn’t involve being at the beck and call of a nasty social climber.

The posh London hotel where the unmarried, pregnant Zelda worked as head cook was demolished and she’s spent the last few weeks working  in a factory canteen in a small town. The interlude as a manufacturing plant chef in a quiet village has worked out to her advantage in that it will give her a chance to quietly give her child up for adoption without anyone who matters to her career being any the wiser. However, she has no intention of rusticating in the countryside forever so she needs to win this event to rekindle her London career. She’s climbed to the top from the bottom before and she’s willing to use every dirty trick she learned along the way to get the radio job.

What she thought was a brilliant match with a rich man has turned into a union fraught with horror for Lady Gwendolyn. Her increasingly violent husband has made it clear to her that she must move them up the social ladder and she’s convinced winning the contest will give her the star power to do just that. She can’t afford to lose, so Gwen advises her sister that she’ll call in her loan if Audrey doesn’t throw the race to her ,and she’s made it clear to Nell that she expects her to do the same. All that’s left now is dealing with Zelda.

Life during wartime is full of the unexpected however, and these ladies’ worlds get turned upside down, inside out and round and round during the competition – and before the contest is over,  these four adversaries will find that friendship is the ingredient needed to truly win.

The author does an absolutely stellar job with her ensemble cast, giving us four unique heroines whose stories slowly weave together to create a charming tapestry of life in wartime rural England. Initially, the lovely, devastated Audrey, and the shy, downtrodden Nell are the only two heroines you really want to root for. Zelda, who’s been betrayed by everyone she’s ever loved, and Gwen, whose ambition landed her in an awful situation, can be so acerbic at first that they are hard to like. As we learn their backstories – and as Zelda and Gwen grow throughout the tale – we begin to love them as well. The characteristic that binds these four together is their sheer determination – these ladies are survivors, people who’ve thrived in tough circumstances and who continue to move doggedly forward with a mingling of grace and grit. The journey of their individual paths from pain and sorrow to success and happiness is lovely and one I was very glad to make with them.

As with any good tale about friendship, the author takes pains to show us how the four are better together than they are as individuals. Gwen, Zelda, Audrey and Nell bring out the best in each other. Not only do they challenge each other to be better cooks via the Kitchen Front competition but they also help each other become better people. Surviving can turn you hard, forcing you to look out only for yourself, or it can make you generous, a team player who helps others along the path to a better life as you achieve one of your own. It is the latter that happens in this novel and the author writes the tale of how our heroines make that choice with a joy, charm and warmth that pulls at the heartstrings,

Ryan does a fantastic job of inserting her rich historical research naturally into the text. The tension of airplane engines droning overhead, forcing people to wonder if they are enemy or ally and making folks figure out how to distinguish between the two and respond in moments is captured with terrific clarity. The frustrations and struggles of dealing with war rationing, of cooking with strange ingredients, and feeding a hungry family on questionable, often tasteless, textureless supplements is brought vividly to life. The bigotry and sexism of the era is also deftly handled within the confines of the story, especially the struggles women faced as they were forced to fend for themselves in a world designed to keep them from succeeding at doing so. Equally well handled is the issue of spousal abuse and how few resources were available to women at the time in dealing with it.

The only flaw in this stellar tale is that it is a bit heavy-handed in regards to the happy ending. Everything works out beautifully, with all four women finding their perfect niche in the world. It was exactly what I needed for where I am and I was completely thrilled with the finale, but those who prefer a touch more realism may be frustrated with the saccharine finish.

The Kitchen Front is a completely delightful tale filled with resilient, resourceful heroines, resonant history and hope for hopeless times. For those looking for a way to warm their heart and soul on a cold winter’s day, you can’t do better than this book.

Buy it at: Amazon, Audible, or your local independent bookstore

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Book Details

Reviewer: Maggie Boyd
Review Date: February 23, 2021
Publication Date: 02/2021
Grade: B+
Sensuality Kisses
Book Type: Historical Fiction
Review Tags: Women's Fiction | World War II

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Cathy D
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Cathy D
02/23/2021 3:34 pm

Y’all are primarily romance readers and you’re saying it’s an unrealistic saccharine ending? Lol not sure what to make of that but I’m going to take it as a good thing

0
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Maggie Boyd
Guest
Maggie Boyd
02/23/2021 9:39 pm
Reply to  Cathy D

Just my .02 of course but there are happy endings where we are left knowing the characters we love will always care for each other and be able to help each other through adversity and then there are syrupy sweet endings that fix everything for everybody, even when that involves shoving aside reality. This is the latter, a DIK, imo, should have the former.

3
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Lisa Fernandes
Guest
Lisa Fernandes
02/23/2021 11:04 pm
Reply to  Cathy D

It’s a bad thing, trust me. Romance and women’s fiction inspire two different sets of expectations, and the author set up a kitchen sink realistic world, the extremely peacenik ending we end up with makes no sense.

3
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Lisa Fernandes
Guest
Lisa Fernandes
02/23/2021 3:16 pm

That’s how I felt about the character development and the wayyy over the top sachaine ending.

2
Reply
Maggie Boyd
Guest
Maggie Boyd
02/24/2021 8:19 am
Reply to  Lisa Fernandes

I did like the ending but it was the equivalent of liking eating a quart of Ben and Jerry’s when you’re down (and who isn’t a touch down in this season?) It was just too much of a good thing.

1
Reply
Lisa Fernandes
Guest
Lisa Fernandes
02/24/2021 10:29 am
Reply to  Maggie Boyd

I think it would’ve gone down better if many some of the women continued to have difficult relationships, or their moving on wasn’t completely successful.

0
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Maggie Boyd
Guest
Maggie Boyd
02/24/2021 10:33 am
Reply to  Lisa Fernandes

Yes. The ending was too neat and relied too much on things going perfectly from then on – and they were still in the middle of a war!

0
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Elaine S
Guest
Elaine S
02/23/2021 7:25 am

It’s a shame that this not available as a kindle book because both the paperback and hardback versions are way above my acceptable book budget purchase price. I’d like to read this as it combines threads I really like: rounded and differing lead characters; war time; cooking; the BBC – probably at its finest ever during WW2. I do wonder about the two sisters, Audrey and Gwen, and how they married into such differing social strata. The comment that Gwen’s husband looked to her to move them up the social ladder surprised me, however, so I’d like to know more about the sisters’ actual background. I also wondered why Nell was cooking in a kitchen in a wealthy household and not in the Land Army or working in an aircraft factory but perhaps that is explained. Also I wondered if the author made any reference to Marguerite Patten, the very doyen of war time cookery and who did, in fact, have a BBC programme called The Kitchen Front.

It was interesting to read the double review but it would have been even more valuable if the opinions on this book had been more divergent as both liked it with few criticisms. Should this every comes out at a reasonable price, I will order it but not at £20 sadly.

0
Reply
Caz Owens
Editor
Caz Owens
02/23/2021 7:57 am
Reply to  Elaine S

It’s available digitally in the US, but not the UK – although I imagine it will be. I remember that the ebook version of the latest Loretta Chase came out here a few weeks after it did in the US.

2
Reply
Dabney Grinnan
Dabney Grinnan
02/23/2021 8:12 am
Reply to  Elaine S

We can’t know, before reviewing a book, whether we will like it or not. Thus there is no way to assign dual reviews and predict the outcome.

At AAR, our reviewers pick the books they wish to review. For me personally, reading two reviews that love a book bumps up my interest in the book.

I can buy a Kindle copy of this book–maybe that’s just in the US?

https://amzn.to/3bvMOh1

Last edited 11 days ago by Dabney Grinnan
2
Reply
Caz Owens
Editor
Caz Owens
02/23/2021 10:35 am
Reply to  Dabney Grinnan

I checked the UK site and there’s no Kindle edition. Maybe there will be one, though.

0
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