The Cookbook Collector

Goodman's novel focuses on two sisters and their lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Berkeley, California, around the end of the 1990s and through 9/11. Jess is the airy philosophy major who ends up in love with a mysterious collection of rare eighteenth-century cookbooks while Emily is an intense software entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. Their lives are touched and changed by partners, friends, trees, estranged family members, the stock market, and other connections. Ariadne Meyers narrates with an enthusiastic, if not overly feminine, touch. It works well with the sisters but less so with several male characters, who are portrayed as either growlers or slackers. Still, Meyers's humorous embodiment of two quirky rabbis is highly entertaining. R.M. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

Starred review from March 8, 2010
If any contemporary author deserves to wear the mantel of Jane Austen, it's Goodman, whose subtle, astute social comedies perfectly capture the quirks of human nature. This dazzling novel is Austen updated for the dot-com era, played out between 1999 and 2001 among a group of brilliant risk takers and truth seekers. Still in her 20s, Emily Bach is the CEO of Veritech, a Web-based data-storage startup in trendy Berkeley. Her boyfriend, charismatic Jonathan Tilghman, is in a race to catch up at his data-security company, ISIS, in Cambridge, Mass. Emily is low-key, pragmatic, kind, serene—the polar opposite of her beloved younger sister, Jess, a crazed postgrad who works at an antiquarian bookstore owned by a retired Microsoft millionaire. When Emily confides her company's new secret project to Jonathan as a proof of her love, the stage is set for issues of loyalty and trust, greed, and the allure of power. What is actually valuable, Goodman's characters ponder: a company's stock, a person's promise, a forest of redwoods, a collection of rare cookbooks? Goodman creates a bubble of suspense as both Veritech and ISIS issue IPOs, career paths collide, social values clash, ironies multiply, and misjudgments threaten to destroy romantic desire. Enjoyable and satisfying, this is Goodman's (Intuition
) most robust, fully realized and trenchantly meaningful work yet.