How to Cook a Tart

September 9, 2002
Food, sex, murder and more food are the subjects of Killham's decadent debut. Jasmine March, a Rubensesque cookbook author and gourmand, is on a crusade to bring her rich recipes to the masses. She lives in Georgetown, in Washington, D.C., with her husband, Daniel, an acting teacher who's sliding into a classic midlife crisis, and their 16-year-old daughter, Careme, a frustrated virgin with an eating disorder and a pet python. Jasmine's publisher threatens to drop her unless she can come up with a low-fat cookbook, even though she longs for "the days when men were gluttons and proud of it... when food was prized, not shunned like some leprous disease," and when her so-called friends in the cutthroat food business don't help at all, she menaces one with a cleaver. Meanwhile, the eponymous tart in question is Tina Sardoni, a wafer-thin student in Daniel's acting class, who has a thing for colon cleansing and married men. The latter predilection lands her on Jasmine's kitchen floor, bludgeoned to death by a marble rolling pin. Jasmine is the perfect suspect, but is she the killer? Foodies, celebrity chefs, fad diets and skinny people all get what's coming to them, as Jasmine waxes poetic on everything from butter to bull testicles. Elaborate culinary descriptions and metaphors tend to overpower the rather meager plot, but this amusing satire will delight readers who believe that eating well is the best revenge. (Oct.)Forecast:Devotees of the Food Network (Anthony Bourdain supplies a blurb) as well as of Faye Weldon will embrace this novel's full-figured heroine and food-friendly message.

September 1, 2002
Jasmine March loves to cook and write about rich and tasty food. Unfortunately, her book editor is not convinced that her excessively fattening dishes-caviar canapes and venison stew, to name a few-are the way to go in today's diet-obsessed market. This puts Jasmine's career on shaky ground. To complicate matters, Jasmine's teenage daughter is anorexic, and her husband, Daniel, seems to be spending a little too much time with one of his young theater students. This first novel by a former Washington Post food writer tries hard to be comical and entertaining, but a third of the way through, it gets a bit stale with the food jokes, overwrought descriptions of dishes, rants about food preferences, and numerous caustic observations about food. Killham, however, salvages the story with a taut and darkly comedic ending. Recommended for large fiction collections.-Margaret Hanes, Sterling Heights P.L., MI

October 15, 2002
The tastes of Washington food writer Jasmine March run counter to current trends. She relishes high-fat foods and refuses to reduce her substantial frame through dieting. And since nutritional correctness favors only low-carb, low-salt, low-flavor recipes with every gram of fat meticulously tabulated, her career lies in shambles. More troubling, Jasmine's adolescent daughter, Careme, has fallen into distinctly anorexic eating habits. To make matters even worse, Jasmine's seemingly devoted husband, Daniel, has taken up with a mistress who demands he undergo colonic irrigations. Just when everything in Jasmine's life seems about to fall apart, a chance television appearance transforms her into a minor local celebrity. Fat is suddenly in, and the suffering scribe now has a chance to resolve the disparate elements of her life. Although murdering the mistress wasn't in her plan, the woman's corpse suddenly appears in Jasmine's kitchen and demands disposition. In the ensuing comedy of errors, we learn the answer to the question assumed by the book's title. Dedicated foodies will find themselves bemused by Killham's drooling descriptions of foods and wines.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)