It’s time for another book club post! I skipped last month’s United States of Arugula. I just couldn’t do it. It looked sooooooo boring. Instead I skipped ahead to this month’s book:
This review will be short and sweet because 1. I read this book over a month ago 2. It was kinda boring.
I will lay out my issues with this book for you and hopefully save you from some of the confusion it caused me.
Let’s start with the title: “The Butcher and The Vegetarian.” I don’t know about you but when I saw this title I thought the book might be about a butcher and a vegetarian. Call me crazy but that is what the title says to me.
Now let’s examine the cover. You can see “the butcher,” he’s the guy standing behind the meat counter handing a wrapped package to a lady we assume is “the vegetarian.” Above their heads is a heart coming from thought bubbles belonging to each of them. Now if I were to judge this book by it’s cover, even if I took the title out of play, I would think this was a book about a woman falling in love with a butcher and him also falling in love with her. Pretty straightforward, right? Then we add the title in and this book just HAS to be a love story involving a butcher and a vegetarian.
One more thing we find if we look at the inside flap of the book, an excerpt from the description reads: “Warily, she ventured into the butcher shop, and as the man behind the counter wrapped up her first-ever chicken, she found herself charmed. Eventually, he dared her to cook her way through his meat counter…”
SO, if you haven’t read this book, you probably think, as I did, that it is a book about a butcher and vegetarian. This book is not about butcher and vegetarian. It’s about a vegetarian. There is no love story, at least not one involving two people falling in love. I’d venture to say there is no love story at all. There is an exploration. The vegetarian tries new foods and likes some and dislikes some and learns a lot about meat and how it affects her health and the health of the world. The event mentioned in the excerpt simply did not happen.
Throughout the book I kept waiting for the charming butcher to arrive on the scene and turn the book into the love story it promised to be. That never happened. This really soured me on the book. If the book had just been HONEST about what it was; maybe a title like “In Search of the Right Food for Me” or “My Food Journey” or even “Meat and The Vegetarian,” I would have felt better about it. If the cover art had shown the heart bubble between the meat package and the lady, it would have been more true to the book.
If I have saved one person from shaking this book upside down and waiting for a love story to fall out, I feel I have done my duty.
The end.
