Making your own bread is incredibly satisfying, in both the process and the product. When it’s something that you’ve fallen into by chance with little experience the results could be surprising, as in Robin Sloan’s Sourdough.
Lois Clary is a software engineer for a company that produces robotic arms, following in the footsteps of her father who worked for General Motors. New to San Francisco and working long hours, Lois leaves little time for feeding herself. When a menu for a small soup and sourdough operation makes its way into her life, she quickly becomes enamored with the spicy soup and sourdough bread the two brothers’s operation brings her nearly every night. As the brothers’ visa expires and they leave the country, they gift Lois their sourdough starter, leaving her with the responsibility, and opportunity, to bake bread on her own. Quickly, Lois becomes a proficient baker with a “singing” starter, opening doors beyond her engineering job to the farmer’s market as well as an exclusive, secret market.
A well-written, quick-moving, and entertaining story with the magic realism aspect presented in the personality and character of the sourdough culture (or starter) simply being fun to read. The selective communities in both tech and the artisan markets are presented with all their quirks, making for some colorful supplementary character sketches to add to Lois’s mild character. As someone who bakes her own sourdough bread, the intricacies of the descriptions of the starter and the bread was decent and familiar, if a tad on the fantastical side. The structure of the narrative was interesting, combining emails from Beo and Lois’s narration; however, the conversation between Lois and Beo often felt one-sided when Lois’s narration of events didn’t cover her responses to Beo’s messages, which led to a feeling of disjointedness in what Beo was sharing.
Overall, I’d give it 4 out of 5 stars.
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