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Summary
Summary
Life is messy . . . but it's the messy bits that give it meaning.
Anna thought she had it all figured out . . . but fate had other plans.
When Anna, a chef by profession, discovers she's pregnant, she prepares to leave dreary London behind and move to idyllic Provence, France, with her husband, Tobias, and her lovable baby-to-be. But she's suddenly forced to reevaluate her dreams when their baby is born less than perfect. Little do Anna and Tobias know that the change in plans sparked by Freya's birth is the beginning of an incredible journey of the heart. Along the way, they discover that there truly is no such thing as a mouseproof kitchen, and though life sometimes gets a little messy, it's the messy bits that give it meaning.
The couple and their new daughter end up in a vermin-infested farmhouse in a remote town in France--far from the mansion in Provence they'd originally imagined. Their rickety home is falling down around them, the village is involved in a decades-old trauma, and even the charms of the region's lavender fields and a budding romance between two of their young neighbors can't distract from the fact that Freya's hospital stays are becoming frighteningly frequent. Anna must draw on reserves of strength she never knew she had just to keep going from day to day. But will it be enough to keep her family together--and her daughter safe?
Told with humor and warmth, The Mouse-Proof Kitchen is a moving and thought-provoking story about how the best parts of life are often the most complicated.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Shah's debut gets off to a slow start, but patient readers will be rewarded by this richly textured drama. Londoners Anna and Tobias's daughter Freya is born with cerebral palsy, greatly complicating their dream of moving to Provence, France, to open a restaurant and compose music. Deeply conflicted, Anna and Tobias make a mad grab at happiness and buy a crumbling farmhouse in Languedoc. There, they care for Freya in a landscape of extremes, with neighbors to match, including Lizzy, a free-spirited American teenager; Ludovic, the tenant farmer who dwells on the French Resistance; Julien, living off the grid in a tree house; and Yvonne, the cafe owner who makes delicious sausages. Mysterious newcomer Kerim arrives to fix up the rundown property, and Anna's mother comes to stay, rounding out the ragtag family. As Freya's health declines steeply, Anna feels herself drifting apart from Tobias, each of them enclosed in a private sphere of misery until disaster strikes, forcing exhausted Anna to either accept her new imperfect life or leave to start anew. Portraying the complexities of marriage, motherhood, family, and life in a strange land, Shah (director of Death in Gaza, a documentary film) combines tragedy and humor into a satisfying tale of love, heartbreak, and transformation. Agent: Patrick Walsh, Conville & Walsh (U.K.). (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Hovering somewhere between chick-litish comedy and heartbreak, this is the tale of a British couple moving, with their first child, born severely disabled, to a run-down farmhouse in a wild corner of France. London-based chef Anna and composer Tobias respond differently to the birth of their mentally and physically challenged daughter, Freya. Anna is consumed with love while Tobias doesn't even want the baby to come home. The deal they strike is to relocate to Les Rajons, a wrecked, remote but scenic French estate, bringing Freya with them. Les Rajons is a domestic nightmare: dirty, neglected, rat-infested. Yet Tobias and Anna settle in, adding some quirky characters to their awkward family, like free spirit Julien, who lives in a tree, and mysterious but angelic Kerim, who repairs the house at no charge. While Anna deals with the chaos by imposing order in the kitchen and Tobias embarks on a film score, the tone can seem light, but there are dark episodes too alongside the interminable stress and complicated emotions of caring for a child who will never develop or recognize her parents. Crises come and go, and over time, both parents learn lessons in love and responsibility. Although it follows a conventional makeover format, Shah's readable debut, drawn in part from personal experience, touches deeper, less predictable notes.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
THERE'S an arresting photograph on the cover of the paperback edition of "The Storyteller's Daughter," Saira Shah's memoir of her adventures in war-torn Afghanistan - an Afghan boy in a turban, regarding the viewer with a shrewdly inquisitive expression. The "boy" is Shah herself, the daughter of the celebrated Sufi fabulist Idries Shah. Born in England in 1964, she returned at age 21 to her father's homeland, then under Soviet occupation. Disguised as a young man, braving frostbite and Russian missiles, she reported back to English newspapers and television on the American-backed mujahedeen, who were importing, as she put it, "a brand of extremist political Islam that... had been almost unknown inside Afghanistan." For nearly two decades, Shah worked as a journalist and documentary filmmaker, winning Emmys for her coverage of war zones from Gaza to Afghanistan. But in 2003, she gave up filmmaking and moved to southern France, where she and her partner now live with their severely disabled daughter. "The Mouse-Proof Kitchen," her first novel, is a fictional reworking of this latest chapter in a life marked by pluck, hardship and adventure. The novel's narrator, Anna, is a London chef married to Tobias, a composer of music for films and television documentaries. Anna is careful and orderly, her husband a lazy charmer. Together they decide to realize a dream common to many middle-class Britons sick of gray drizzle and emboldened by the disparity between property prices in England and France: they will sell their flat and settle in the French countryside once Anna, now pregnant, delivers their baby. "My plans are laid," Anna informs us. "All will be well. In southern France, the sun will shine kindly on us. The people will be friendly. Our daughter will grow up bilingual, sophisticated, safe from pedophiles. She won't need the latest Nike trainers; she won't eat junk. I can see the house we'll buy: a cottage in Provence with roses and hollyhocks around the door, a field of lavender dotted with olive trees, the deep blue of the sea merging into the azure sky." All, of course, does not turn out so well. Since Provence is now almost as pricey as Islington, the couple is forced westward into the harsher hinterland of the Languedoc, where Tobias sweet-talks Anna into buying Les Rajons, a hilltop wreck with staggering views and, the locals hint, a tragic past. Southern France, they discover, is a rancorously xenophobic place, bristling with feuds old and new - between farmers over scarce water, between families with roots in the Resistance and those of former collaborators, between right-wing boar hunters and hippie dropouts. The workmen Anna summons to attend to Les Rajons' leaking roof and "nonexistent" plumbing quote prices she can't afford, then tell her "they don't want the work anyway." The mice that have overrun the house gnaw their way through everything from Nutella jars to electrical wiring. Tobias's latest commission risks falling through; Anna's plans to open a cooking school are stymied. There is a deeper horror, however, darkening the couple's idyll. Freya, their "beautiful," "perfect" baby, has been born with a brain "like scrambled eggs" and a "shopping list" of disabilities, including a tendency to have frequent seizures. As the doctors struggle to assess what seems to be an unusually catastrophic case of cerebral palsy, Anna and Tobias are left wondering whether their daughter will ever recognize them, let alone be able to roll over, breathe or feed herself unaided. The quandaries they face - should they try not to get too "attached" to Freya, since she may not pull through, or would it be worse if she did survive? - threaten to capsize their marriage and destroy any previous notions of what constitutes an acceptable life. These are the two intertwined dramas that make up "The Mouse-Proof Kitchen": the unsuitable house, the unsuitable baby. Although at no time does either Anna or Tobias seem to consider putting Les Rajons back on the market, they do often contemplate - and even make halfhearted stabs at - returning their child to the shop. IN "The Storyteller's Daughter," Shah managed to impart a wry humor to her war-zone encounters with gun runners, spies and preening tribal rulers. Humor in "The Mouse-Proof Kitchen" becomes a still more anarchically life-affirming response to disaster. What might well, as the author has acknowledged in interviews, have been a "misery memoir" is instead a gutsy recital of all the wildly inappropriate jokes, crockery smashing, extramarital dalliances and unheroic efforts to escape child care in which two terminally stressed-out parents can indulge. It's cathartic to read of Tobias's proposal that they leave their little darling in the hospital and flee to Brazil, or of Anna's mad dash to an I.V.F. clinic to see if she can conceive a new baby from a less tainted sperm donor than her feckless husband. It's cathartic to read of Tobias - after his wife has spent the night trying to calm Freya, who has screamed for eight hours - whining when she serves him instant coffee. Luckily, like most functioning couples, one of them tends to find new reserves of endurance just when the other is saying, "It's me or her." Luckily, there's a motley cast of relatives, old friends, medical staffers and eccentric Languedoc neighbors to ease this journey of the heart - the most colorful being Anna's crankily narcissistic mother, who is given to wondering if they can't simply "train" Freya. ("After all, you can even train a slug.") Shah writes with sensuous passion of the Languedoc's climatic plagues and bounties, and the husbandry required to deal with them. As the novel proceeds through the seasons of her family's first year in France, Anna, working from the wartime recipe book of a local Resistance heroine who previously lived at Les Rajons, struggles to convert cherries, figs and damask roses into jams, which must then be funneled into jars sturdy enough to withstand the marauding mice. This battle against nature's chaos is set in deft counterpoint to Freya's struggle to survive, with her parents realizing that even as their daughter blossoms into a smiling cuddly creature, her "fitting" is becoming more frequent, her ability to feed or digest diminishing. The fragmentary, journal-like format of "The Mouse-Proof Kitchen" makes for an invigorating rhythm of quick cuts among its subplots as Anna and Tobias forge a richly haphazard life on this unpromising soil. Unfortunately, despite Shah's knack for pacing and suspense, her novel is uneven. There's too glaring a discrepancy between what she knows inside out (be it French cultural values or the heartbreak of mothering a radically "incomplete" child) and the high melodrama of the overly contrived plot, between the characters Shah wholeheartedly believes in and those who open their mouths only to offer her heroine sage advice - or to reveal, at critical moments, long-hidden secrets about the Nazi occupation. "Sometimes life gets a little messy" was the phrase inscribed on the cover of the advance copies of "The Mouse-Proof Kitchen." If Shah hadn't felt compelled to tie up every loose end in a bow, this novel would be as powerful as it is engaging. Two dramas intertwine in Shahs first novel: the unsuitable house, the unsuitable baby. Fernanda Eberstadt's most recent book is a novel, "Rat.
Library Journal Review
Hard-working, London-based restaurant chef Anna has two life goals-to become a mother and to move to Provence in southeastern France to teach in her mentor's cooking school. Motherhood arrives, but Anna's daughter is born with profound physical and mental handicaps. After Provence proves to be too expensive for their modest budget, Anna and her partner, Tobias, are persuaded to purchase a crumbling estate in the less popular Languedoc region. A never-ending series of medical crises puts an enormous strain on a relationship already troubled by house problems. Every attempt to mouseproof the kitchen so that Anna can open her own cooking school fails miserably, as the mice turn out to be king-sized rats. Verdict London-based journalist Shah debuts with a highly entertaining novel whose bucolic setting and eccentric neighbors hint at Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence. But while Mayle's problems were humorously scalable, Anna's prove nearly insurmountable. Be careful what you wish for. [See Prepub Alert, 1/6/13.]-Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The Mouse-Proof Kitchen December Excerpted from The Mouse-Proof Kitchen by Saira Shah All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
