Hungry Woman In Paris: Book Review

I've told you before that when things get too much, I tend to run. Or at least I used to before I had all these kids underfoot, dishes piling up, and a husband who needs clean socks. My running days are over, but I still get wanderlust and imagine myself jetting off to locations unknown, having the world at my feet and endless possibilities. A girl can dream, right?

That's the foundation behind the novel Hungry Woman In Paris. Canela just lost a her cousin to suicide, and ended her seemingly perfect engagement. What does she do? She runs to Paris of course.

A journalist and activist, Canela believes passion is essential to life; but lately passion seems to be in short supply. It has disappeared from her relationship with her fiancé, who is more interested in controlling her than encouraging her. It's absent from her work, where censorship and politics keep important stories from being published. And while her family is full of outspoken individuals, the only one Canela can truly call passionate is her cousin and best friend Luna, who just took her own life.

Canela can't recover from Luna's death. She is haunted by her ghost and feels acute pain for the dreams that went unrealized. Canela breaks off her engagement and uses her now un-necessary honeymoon ticket, to escape to Paris. Impulsively, she sublets a small apartment and enrolls at Le Coq Rouge, Paris's most prestigious culinary institute.

Cooking school is a sensual and spiritual reawakening that brings back Canela's hunger for life. With a series of new friends and lovers, she learns to once again savor the world around her. Finally able to cope with Luna's death, Canela returns home to her family, and to the kind of life she thought she had lost forever.

As a reformed runner and avid foodie, I had high hopes for this book. It seemed to possess everything that would interest me, and I looked forward to escaping into its pages. While the majority of the book did live up to my expectations, there was one huge flaw. The book is pretty much littered with porn, folks. Incredibly explicit sex scenes are strewn throughout the storyline, sometimes in ways that don't even flow with the progression of the story. The main character is portrayed as a very loose woman, to put it mildly, having all manner of relations with men and women alike. I understand why these experiences were included in the story, as this is a "coming of age" tale, and the character was sowing her oats and reclaiming her self and living life. But seriously, I didn't need all the gory details. It really detracted from the overall appeal of the book and tainted my opinion of the novel.

Apart from the sexiness of this book, there's quite a bit of "woe is me"to the main character. It takes the entire book for her to find her own backbone and inner strength. There's also a lot of cultural and ethnic discussion, focusing on how immigrants are treated by the government. The cultural and political aspects were quite interesting, as was the storyline surrounding the French Cooking School. Yet sadly, the sex scenes and suicidal tendencies of the main character overshadowed all else.

Hungry Woman In Paris is written by Josefina Lopez, who is well known for co-authoring the movie Real Women Have Curves. This is her first novel. The Hachette Book Group generously provided me with a copy of Hungry Woman In Paris for this review.

Read an excerpt below, or purchase your own copy at a retailer near you.