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Jennifer Ryan’s The Kitchen Front is a wonderful, charming tale about the healing power of friendship and how we best learn to stand on our own by first learning to lean on those who love us.
One of the biggest challenges facing the home front in Britain during the Second World War is food shortages. With severely limited cooking staples people arehaving to get extremely creative to put a decent dinner on the table. The government’s solution is a radio program called The Kitchen Front, designed to help home chefs create meals which work around food rationing. One of the hosts is a popular male radio personality. The BBC decides to hold a cooking competition to find the best possible female co-host for the broadcast, unleashing a serious conflict among four women in a small village who are each determined to get the job.
Since her husband’s death in combat Audrey has had her hands more than full. Her three boys feel their father’s loss keenly, and comforting them as well as feeding and clothing them is a full time job. Just to keep a roof over their heads, she’s had to borrow money from her sister Gwen – with whom she doesn’t get along and who takes every opportunity to berate, undermine and belittle Audrey. The only thing keeping Audrey’s small family afloat are the pies, cakes and other delicacies she bakes to bring in a few extra pennies per week. Being co-host of The Kitchen Front would be a huge boost to her business and her coffers.
Housemaid/kitchen girl Nell despises working for Lady Gwendolyn (Gwen) Strickland, a complete shrew who overworks and underpays her staff. Winning the competition will allow Nell to leave the isolated estate where she works, meet people – hopefully at least a few of them handsome single men – and establish a new career which doesn’t involve being at the beck and call of a nasty social climber.
The posh London hotel where the unmarried, pregnant Zelda worked as head cook was demolished and she’s spent the last few weeks working in a factory canteen in a small town. The interlude as a manufacturing plant chef in a quiet village has worked out to her advantage in that it will give her a chance to quietly give her child up for adoption without anyone who matters to her career being any the wiser. However, she has no intention of rusticating in the countryside forever so she needs to win this event to rekindle her London career. She’s climbed to the top from the bottom before and she’s willing to use every dirty trick she learned along the way to get the radio job.
What she thought was a brilliant match with a rich man has turned into a union fraught with horror for Lady Gwendolyn. Her increasingly violent husband has made it clear to her that she must move them up the social ladder and she’s convinced winning the contest will give her the star power to do just that. She can’t afford to lose, so Gwen advises her sister that she’ll call in her loan if Audrey doesn’t throw the race to her ,and she’s made it clear to Nell that she expects her to do the same. All that’s left now is dealing with Zelda.
Life during wartime is full of the unexpected however, and these ladies’ worlds get turned upside down, inside out and round and round during the competition – and before the contest is over, these four adversaries will find that friendship is the ingredient needed to truly win.
The author does an absolutely stellar job with her ensemble cast, giving us four unique heroines whose stories slowly weave together to create a charming tapestry of life in wartime rural England. Initially, the lovely, devastated Audrey, and the shy, downtrodden Nell are the only two heroines you really want to root for. Zelda, who’s been betrayed by everyone she’s ever loved, and Gwen, whose ambition landed her in an awful situation, can be so acerbic at first that they are hard to like. As we learn their backstories – and as Zelda and Gwen grow throughout the tale – we begin to love them as well. The characteristic that binds these four together is their sheer determination – these ladies are survivors, people who’ve thrived in tough circumstances and who continue to move doggedly forward with a mingling of grace and grit. The journey of their individual paths from pain and sorrow to success and happiness is lovely and one I was very glad to make with them.
As with any good tale about friendship, the author takes pains to show us how the four are better together than they are as individuals. Gwen, Zelda, Audrey and Nell bring out the best in each other. Not only do they challenge each other to be better cooks via the Kitchen Front competition but they also help each other become better people. Surviving can turn you hard, forcing you to look out only for yourself, or it can make you generous, a team player who helps others along the path to a better life as you achieve one of your own. It is the latter that happens in this novel and the author writes the tale of how our heroines make that choice with a joy, charm and warmth that pulls at the heartstrings,
Ryan does a fantastic job of inserting her rich historical research naturally into the text. The tension of airplane engines droning overhead, forcing people to wonder if they are enemy or ally and making folks figure out how to distinguish between the two and respond in moments is captured with terrific clarity. The frustrations and struggles of dealing with war rationing, of cooking with strange ingredients, and feeding a hungry family on questionable, often tasteless, textureless supplements is brought vividly to life. The bigotry and sexism of the era is also deftly handled within the confines of the story, especially the struggles women faced as they were forced to fend for themselves in a world designed to keep them from succeeding at doing so. Equally well handled is the issue of spousal abuse and how few resources were available to women at the time in dealing with it.
The only flaw in this stellar tale is that it is a bit heavy-handed in regards to the happy ending. Everything works out beautifully, with all four women finding their perfect niche in the world. It was exactly what I needed for where I am and I was completely thrilled with the finale, but those who prefer a touch more realism may be frustrated with the saccharine finish.
The Kitchen Front is a completely delightful tale filled with resilient, resourceful heroines, resonant history and hope for hopeless times. For those looking for a way to warm their heart and soul on a cold winter’s day, you can’t do better than this book.
Buy it at: Amazon, Audible, or your local independent bookstore
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Grade: B+
Book Type: Historical Fiction
Sensuality: Kisses
Review Date: 23/02/21
Publication Date: 02/2021
Recent Comments …
Yep
This sounds delightful! I’m grabbing it, thanks
excellent book: interesting, funny dialogs, deep understanding of each character, interesting secondary characters, and also sexy.
I don’t think anyone expects you to post UK prices – it’s just a shame that such a great sale…
I’m sorry about that. We don’t have any way to post British prices as an American based site.
I have several of her books on my TBR and after reading this am moving them up the pile.
I've been an avid reader since 2nd grade and discovered romance when my cousin lent me Lord of La Pampa by Kay Thorpe in 7th grade. I currently read approximately 150 books a year, comprised of a mix of Young Adult, romance, mystery, women's fiction, and science fiction/fantasy.
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Y’all are primarily romance readers and you’re saying it’s an unrealistic saccharine ending? Lol not sure what to make of that but I’m going to take it as a good thing
Just my .02 of course but there are happy endings where we are left knowing the characters we love will always care for each other and be able to help each other through adversity and then there are syrupy sweet endings that fix everything for everybody, even when that involves shoving aside reality. This is the latter, a DIK, imo, should have the former.
It’s a bad thing, trust me. Romance and women’s fiction inspire two different sets of expectations, and the author set up a kitchen sink realistic world, the extremely peacenik ending we end up with makes no sense.
That’s how I felt about the character development and the wayyy over the top sachaine ending.
I did like the ending but it was the equivalent of liking eating a quart of Ben and Jerry’s when you’re down (and who isn’t a touch down in this season?) It was just too much of a good thing.
I think it would’ve gone down better if many some of the women continued to have difficult relationships, or their moving on wasn’t completely successful.
Yes. The ending was too neat and relied too much on things going perfectly from then on – and they were still in the middle of a war!
It’s a shame that this not available as a kindle book because both the paperback and hardback versions are way above my acceptable book budget purchase price. I’d like to read this as it combines threads I really like: rounded and differing lead characters; war time; cooking; the BBC – probably at its finest ever during WW2. I do wonder about the two sisters, Audrey and Gwen, and how they married into such differing social strata. The comment that Gwen’s husband looked to her to move them up the social ladder surprised me, however, so I’d like to know more about the sisters’ actual background. I also wondered why Nell was cooking in a kitchen in a wealthy household and not in the Land Army or working in an aircraft factory but perhaps that is explained. Also I wondered if the author made any reference to Marguerite Patten, the very doyen of war time cookery and who did, in fact, have a BBC programme called The Kitchen Front.
It was interesting to read the double review but it would have been even more valuable if the opinions on this book had been more divergent as both liked it with few criticisms. Should this every comes out at a reasonable price, I will order it but not at £20 sadly.
It’s available digitally in the US, but not the UK – although I imagine it will be. I remember that the ebook version of the latest Loretta Chase came out here a few weeks after it did in the US.
We can’t know, before reviewing a book, whether we will like it or not. Thus there is no way to assign dual reviews and predict the outcome.
At AAR, our reviewers pick the books they wish to review. For me personally, reading two reviews that love a book bumps up my interest in the book.
I can buy a Kindle copy of this book–maybe that’s just in the US?
https://amzn.to/3bvMOh1
I checked the UK site and there’s no Kindle edition. Maybe there will be one, though.
Yes, I know and understand the way it works and, as both reviewers liked it, then that is a positive nudge for me. Still, it would have been interesting if there was a difference as there often is here amongst the comments. Maybe this is a book that most everyone would like – great achievement for the author. No kindle version here in the UK as Caz said but I live in hope!
Regarding Marguerite Patten, she is not mentioned in the book aside from in the author’s note section. Audrey and Gwen’s family owned land and what was once a grand house but the family was no longer wealthy and Audrey’s husband was essentially a failed artist who apparently didn’t have any money. I also received the impression that he didn’t have much financial acumen and had run the family into debt. It was implied his background was genteel poverty. Gwen’s husband started out as a factory owner, with wealth but no social status whereas Gwen’s family still had some small amount of prestige. She apparently convinced him she knew how to move up the social structure. Nell is an orphan who was more or less raised by the Strickland’s cook. She’s stayed to help the older lady out, knowing Gwen would push Nell’s work off on the elderly cook without a qualm although Nell does say that when she turns twenty she won’t have a choice but to do war work due to conscription.
Thanks, Maggie, that clarifies my questions. Hopefully it will appear as a kindle edition soon.
Library. I’m getting my copy there
Always a good place to go when you are not sure :-)
Sadly, ours is closed during lockdown and do not have e-books for loan compatible with kindle. I have a friend who works in a library in a nearby city and she says it’s very, very sad that they are not open and those staff not on furlough are doing admin jobs, cataloging, storing stuff and waiting to re-open. She (and I) hope very much that children do not lose interest in attending library story telling sessions and learning about the wonders of reading.
Our library is *closed* to the public but people can request books online and by phone. They schedule an appointment to pick the books up from a table we’ve set up outside. Kids can watch story time online as well and as far as that goes https://www.storylineonline.net/ has celebrities reading books to kids which are cute and work much like a story time. I’m pretty sure the NY Public Library has also made their story times available online so I would check around the web for that sort of content.