Julie & Julia by Julie Powell - Book Review #1

Julie & Julia

by Julie Powell

With the humor of Bridget Jones and the vitality of Augusten Burroughs, Julie Powell recounts how she conquered every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking and saved her soul.

Julie Powell is 30 years old, living in a tiny apartment in Queens and working at a soul-sucking secretarial job that's going nowhere. She needs something to break the monotony of her life, and she invents a deranged assignment. She will take her mother's worn, dog-eared copy of Julia Child's 1961 classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and she will cook all 524 recipes -- in the span of one year.

At first she thinks it will be easy. But as she moves from the simple Potage Parmentier (potato soup) into the more complicated realm of aspics and crepes, she realizes there's more to Mastering the Art of French Cooking than meets the eye.

And somewhere along the line she realizes she has turned her outer-borough kitchen into a miracle of creation and cuisine. She has eclipsed her life's ordinariness through spectacular humor, hysteria, and perseverance.

I picked up this book after I saw Julie & Julia movie. I loved movie so much, that I just needed more inside information that you can only get from the book. I never heard about either Julie Powell or Julia Child before the movie, and after a quick research online, I was so fascinated with the both those ladies that I ran to the nearest B&N store.

I usually don’t like non-fiction books, such as biographies or autobiographies. So I spent some time in the store flipping through the pages to understand if this book was really for me. And I got so carried away that my husband almost had to tear the book off my hands, so the store clerk could check-out it.

Julie & Julia definitely didn’t read like an autobiography and if didn’t know who Julie Powell was and about her blog, I would never guess that this book was something else then a fiction – a chick-lit. It was such a light and lovely book that I red it in almost a day.

I heard from some people that they found Julie Powell writing to be hysterical sometimes, but I would have to disagree with this statement. Her book was not hysterical, it was alive and Julie Powell herself was alive in her book. I guess it might be because her writing is honest, vivid and funny. She was not trying to act like someone she really wasn’t. She also was not trying to hide her weak points and add to herself characteristics that she didn’t possessed.

In general, I must say that I loved the book and I’m enormously grateful to the movie makers who introduced me to Julie Powell and Julia Child, both incredible women. I would recommend this book not only to those who likes autobiographies and cooking, but also to those who likes chick-lit.