Product Description
Every time we tell someone about this book we get puzzled grins, raised eyebrows, and hilarious guesses as to what on earth The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook might possibly be. Every time we tell a guy about it, he becomes instantly intent on doing pretty much anything if it’ll get him into the book. One boy (who swears he only went out with Thisbe in order to get a recipe named after him) found out he’d missed the print deadline by a hair but that the cover wasn’t done yet… More >>
The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook: They Came, They Cooked, They Left
I’m utterly confused, too. What is this supposed to be?
1. This book doesn’t belong in the cookbook section. Absolutely worthless on that score. A bunch of sugared-up sweets and a few other things I wouldn’t feed my dog (maybe that’s intentional? is that part of some inside joke?).
2. It doesn’t belong in the general reading section either. If possible, even worse as a work of fictionalized who-knows-what. The “stories” that go along with the recipes are the worst kind of hack chick-fic: tedious and with an artificial flavour, much like the recipes.
If anything is worth a star about this book, it’s the huge laugh I got from the review by the woman who said she put it on her women’s lit reading list. Really? And they let you teach at an accredited college? Too funny.
Rating: 1 / 5
I hope you have a good plumber because you will be sorely tempted to flush this book down the toilet. The authors seem to have spent more time in Kindergarten than a prestigious writer’s program. If you want lame, clipped-out-of-magazines collage work, why not take out a bunch of subscriptions and hand your kid a pair of scissors? If you want a sad, angry woman’s cookbook, why not go with Martha Stewart rather than these amateurs? This book is truly scraping the bottom of the barrel to turn nothing into something that makes money.
Rating: 1 / 5
Apologies to my ex for giving her this book for her birthday. Very ill-advised. She let me read some of it, which I hadn’t done before picking it up at a discount bookstore, and we had a laugh over how bad it is. Oh well. At least we’re already broken up. I thought the book was going to encourage girls to cook for their ex-boyfriends. No such luck. Too bad I didn’t know about the reviews beforehand. If there’s ever a book about bad gifts given by ex-boyfriends, I’ll probably be in it after this.
Rating: 1 / 5
Wholly unappetizing, to put it in cookbook terms. Thematically ripped off from Dobie Gillis, but without a whiff of the charm and interest of the original. You really don’t care about any of the “characters” introduced in this book. Stale ingredients make for a bland dish.
Rating: 1 / 5
Despite the hoity-toity tossing about of educational credentials, to paraphrase Bridget Jones (if you loved Bridget Jones, you will NOT love this), this book is positively un-Vonnegutesque.
I didn’t fall for the defensive reviews seemingly submitted by the authors’ friends and school chums. I fell for the older trick: being seduced by the negative reviews into thinking that there was much ado about something. Occasionally people will pan a book just because it went against their ideology or they didn’t like the author…whatever. Controversy tends to stir up interest. In this case, there was nothing to justify loving or hating the book.
Bottom line: the book has the intellectual weight of meringue. A few recipes tied to personal stories that seem trumped up but still a yawn. That’s it. Five minutes in the bookstore or using the online “search inside” function will give you the gist in a few pages. Most who do that ahead of time won’t bother to take it home.
Rating: 1 / 5