Wynter, a privileged Los Angeles housewife, is summarily dumped, and thus begins a rather predictable story of reinvention and romance. Wynter moves to Portland, gets a job at a bakery and picks up the pieces of her life in this rambling, often breathless narrative. But even if the story is a bit predictable, several recipes for bread are included that look pretty good.

Bread Alone is a novel about a woman going through a divorce. A friend of mine pulled her copy off her family-room bookshelf, and told me that she liked how the author incorporated recipes and bread-baking wisdom into the story of a woman re-building her life. I told her about my “bake bread” goal on 43-things, and my story about the results of my recent experiment in bread-baking. So, I took the novel home and was surprised at how many parallels there were between the story of the main character, “Wyn,” who must re-build her life after an unwanted divorce, and my own. Unfortunately, I was more depressed than hopeful after finishing the book. Everything just falls into place in the story, and within a year, Wyn has embarked on her new life, in a new city, with a new business, a new lover, and a new understanding of her parents.

I may try some of the recipes. And I do like the quotation that opens the book:

Upside down I may take shape.
I may become resilient.
Kneaded, turned on end
I will become less
And somehow more myself.
^{from BECOMING BREAD by Gunilla Norris}