Pentapod reviewed The Baker's Secret by Stephen P. Kiernan
Review of "The Baker's Secret" on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
Somewhere between 3 and 4 stars for this one. Can you have a light-reading WWII novel? Is that a thing that can exist? If so, this is it. It's about Emmanuelle (Emma), the apprentice to jewish baker Uncle Ezra in a fictional French town that is soon occupied by the Germans. After the Germans move in and Ezra is shot, Emma fills in as the local baker, and attracts the attention of the German commandant with her fine baguettes. She's given a daily flour ration in order to bake a dozen baguettes for the officers, but meanwhile her grandmother and the townsfolk around her are starving to death ... so she begins adding finely ground straw to the flour in order to stretch the 12 loaves into 14 and help feed more people.
Slowly the 2 extra loaves and the protection of the commandant also put her in a position …
Somewhere between 3 and 4 stars for this one. Can you have a light-reading WWII novel? Is that a thing that can exist? If so, this is it. It's about Emmanuelle (Emma), the apprentice to jewish baker Uncle Ezra in a fictional French town that is soon occupied by the Germans. After the Germans move in and Ezra is shot, Emma fills in as the local baker, and attracts the attention of the German commandant with her fine baguettes. She's given a daily flour ration in order to bake a dozen baguettes for the officers, but meanwhile her grandmother and the townsfolk around her are starving to death ... so she begins adding finely ground straw to the flour in order to stretch the 12 loaves into 14 and help feed more people.
Slowly the 2 extra loaves and the protection of the commandant also put her in a position where she can help others, until she is doing a daily circuit of the town trading eggs for fuel and fuel for fish and fish for other favours and so on, keeping the town going under the nose of the Germans. This is really just the story of Emma; the rest of the characters are fairly ephemeral and only present for the purpose of their interactions with Emma. It's a nice story but seems far too easy and tidy to feel real; timing coincidentally always works out just right for Emma, and nothing is ever really quite as bad as it probably should have been. Some other reviewers called this a WWII fairy tale and that's a good description. It's a pleasant little story of a WWII baker saving as many lives as she can, but it really doesn't feel real. So, you may or may not enjoy this depending on what you want to get out of it. I found it an enjoyable read but I'm sure in a year I won't have the slightest memory of anything that happened in it.