Just Jennifer

Kitchens of the Great Midwest by J. Ryan Stradal (Pamela Dorman, July)

Eva Thorvald is an extreme chef: a seat at one of her $1,000 a plate pop-up dinner parties is highly coveted and sought after with a lottery and waiting list of possibly decades.  Eva’s particular---and often peculiar---style was shaped by an almost Dickensian upbringing: her mother left her when she was an infant, her father dying just a few short months later.  Eva was raised, unknowingly for most of her life, by her uncle and aunt as their own child.  Her birth father, Lars, a chef, and her mother Cindy, a sommelier, gave Eva an extremely gifted palate, one she has refined over the years.  Eva’s story is told, effectively, through vignettes of those she encountered during her life, especially through her younger years, but never from Eva herself, creating a distance from her and in her.  Eva appears to have few ties with anyone beyond a select few and even her business, pop-up dinners, carefully planned and orchestrated years in advance, have no permanency.  The narrative leads to a final chapter that is a culmination of Eva’s life works, of all the parts of her life, but ends with the same heartbreaking detachment with which Eva has lived her life.  The upper Midwest setting, its sensibilities and dialects are authentic and colorful, giving Eva a solid community in which to grow up and a community, the family she chooses, in which to life her life.