Mrs. Quinn's Rise to Fame

by Olivia Ford

At the age of 77, Mrs. Jennifer Quinn decides she’d like to enter the Britain Bakes contest.  After all, she’s baked most of her life.  But she keeps her desire and the application process a secret from her husband, Bernard, thinking she wouldn’t get chosen and feeling uncertain about his response.  This leads to his suspicions that she has some medical problems.  There is one other secret she’s kept from him for fear of destroying their solid and loving marriage.

I enjoyed reading this book but the second secret seemed to me an odd addition to the story. 

"It’s strange, she thought, how recipes outlive the people that wrote them and yet they almost bring a part of that person back to life, as if a tiny piece of their soul lives in those instructions.”    p. 3 ¶ last

“Life could take away opportunities, but never your imagination.”    p 95 ¶2

“She studied the photograph of all that Ann and Fred had made [their grandchildren].  Although they were no older than five or six, it struck her that they were little time capsules of all those who came before them, mirrors of their ancestors who had lived through wars and fallen in love and, by a stroke of luck, survived.  That red hair, an aptitude for math, was in fact an age-old gift from someone that they had never met, but without whom they would not exist.”    p. 99, ¶1

“She would never be able to comprehend the strange borrowed time that you experience before bad news hits; the minutes, hours, sometimes days where you reside in a bubble of ignorance, a place where small things still matter, before it is pierced by the needle of perspective.”     p. 216 ¶5

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