The Paris Cooking School (Sophie Beaumont, Ultimo)

Two middle-class women at a crossroads in life travel to Paris to learn to cook ‘the French Way’ at Sylvie Morel’s Paris Cooking School. Gabi has lost her muse, Kate is reeling from her husband’s betrayal, and even Sylvie is being sabotaged. Throughout Sophie Beaumont’s The Paris Cooking School, these three women will realise their strengths, feel the sparks of romance and ultimately triumph. The true joy and decadence of the novel are in Beaumont’s luscious descriptions of three-course meals, markets and boulangeries. The wider cast of characters is perhaps intentionally two-dimensional to allow the food to shine. It’s a principle of French cooking applied to storytelling—simple ingredients, extraordinary results. Thoroughly researched, The Paris Cooking School is a novel borne of longing for Paris, and despite its base in ‘real life’, it feels entirely like a fantasy you can step inside of. Beaumont has a longstanding and prolific career as children’s fantasy author Sophie Masson, and she was raised in France. Her experience as a fantasy author is evident in the denouement of this novel, as every loose end is neatly tied up (as in her prolific Thomas Trew series), although this does sometimes give a rushed impression. It feels decidedly un-French not to let Sylvie, Gabi and Kate linger in the messiness of mid-life. The Paris Cooking School may aspire to be Julia Child but is more like Nina George’s The Little Paris Bookshop or a Martin Walker detective novel—and will satisfy readers searching for something sweet.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Emily Westmoreland is the Program Director of Willy Lit Fest, the founder of Dinner Party Press and part of the prize-team behind the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize. She works as a bookseller by day. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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