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Baking Cakes In Kigali Baking Cakes In Kigali (2009)

by Gaile Parkin(Favorite Author)

3.68 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0440338794 (ISBN13: 9780440338796)

languge

English

genre

Food & Cookbooks

publisher

Delacorte Press

series

Bakery

review 1: This book appealed to me because it regularly reminded me of my sister who bakes and decorates cakes (though not with the business frame of mind that Angel does) and who tells me she should be a life coach or maybe a dictator. I appreciated the ways in which Angel applied her influence to right wrongs, guide life choices and bring people together, but I found that I wasn't very emotionally invested. As it is set in Rwanda, it is strange to say that it is a light read, but that is apparently what the author intended.
review 2: I smell book series.Yet another white person who grew up in Africa tries to cram themselves into the Africans' skin and lives, and "tell it like it is". Only of course, it can't be. Not really. The author obviously believes she has the "i... morensider's view" and yet by her own admission, the people do keep themselves separate even while living side-by-side. All of the white people are depicted as untrustworthy, grasping, immodest, or downright thieves--oh, except for the "volunteers." They're OK. (The author, after all, was one. And we are always the exception, in our own lives). The Hindu women characters are all obsessed with germs and cleanliness, and essentially ignorant and "laughable" (which reveals some kind of issue burning somewhere). All of the African characters are wonderful, warm, understanding folks--even the guy who waits to see if his girlfriend has a boy or a girl so he can decide whether or not to kick her to the curb and go off with his other baby mama. Even the guy who "falls in love" with a different girl every five minutes--but the moment she doesn't meet his untried, unrealistic expectations, he's off to the next "love." The only "bad" Africans in the story are obviously mentally unbalanced, so we can blame it all on the tragedy that is African life, and blame "the colonials" for everything. The authoress seems to believe that if the white man had just left Africa alone, everything would be rosy.As for the story itself, the first two or three chapters bubble and chatter and ferment with dozens of characters, crowding the pages to the place it's hard to keep them all straight, or engage with any of them. The main character lives in an exclusive compound (ie gated,. guarded community) inhabited by "aid workers" who live a large slice above the people on the street. Her husband works at the university (I think, I'm still rather confused) and she makes cakes to sell and help out. Of course, she has American friends who bring her supplies on a monthly basis, in the suitcases that breeze unchecked through Customs, or none of this would even be possible. The people she deals with on a daily basis can all somehow afford custom-made celebratory cakes, and she somehow has time to make and decorate them, in spite of looking after 5 grandchildren whose parents are all dead.I kept looking for a unifying narrative thread. It takes about half the novel to find one...Angel has to learn to deal with the reality of "that disease" (AIDS) in her own family. Oh, it was there, all right, but she couldn't deal with it. Miraculously, of course, her grandkids are all unaffected, despite their parents being positive.This book is an excuse for the author's own philosophical ruminations. It could have been so much better, but for me it read like a combination of McCall Smith's "philosophy club" books (ugh) with a patina of Precious Ramotswe. The Number One novels are also chains of stories, but each story has a central issue, with some kind of resolution. Parkin's book chatters on to the end, leaving the reader rather dazed. As Billy Crystal would say, "She didn't leave anything on the table." less

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