Twenty-nine-year-old Momoko has been tragically dumped. So Momoko does what many broken-hearted people do – she gets incredibly drunk. So drunk that she passes out in a nearly empty café. When she wakes, she pours her heart out to Iori, the curious and impossibly handsome manager, and Hozumi, a Buddhist monk in training and café regular.
As Momoko describes how her ex loved her cooking, the manager decides to allow her to slip into the kitchen and cook up his favourite dish: a delicious butter chicken curry.
Momoko realises that this combination of cooking and sharing has stopped the flow of her constant tears. And the manager has a brilliant idea: what if they started doing this regularly, inviting customers to share stories about heartbreak while cooking dishes that held significance in their relationships? And so, an unconventional therapy group, the ‘Ex-Boyfriend’s Favourite Recipe Funeral Committee’ is born…
Review
The Ex-Boyfriend’s Favourite Recipe Funeral Committee is a cosy, heartwarming read. If you enjoy reading about food and how it can facilitate honest, emotional conversations, this is a book you should pick up. Each chapter is centred on one of the committee’s meetings, which includes a dish that is special to the character attending that meeting. Each chapter is then accompanied by the recipe for that dish. I’m not a skilled or adventurous enough cook to give them a try, but they sure do sound delicious!
Committee explored heartbreak, but it also explored questions about gender roles and cultural expectations. I particularly enjoyed the conversations around being ‘a low-maintenance woman’, and how women should be able to be themselves and speak up for what they want in a romantic relationship. It’s a bit of a stretch to call the Committee a ‘therapy group’, as the blurb does. However, the conversations in the meeting are honest, emotional, and supportive; it was lovely to read how each guest of the committee processed their heartbreak, and how Momoko developed insights into her own.
“We desire such things that “everyone else’ wants, and yet as soon as someone falls in love with this version of us – a version that makes us an imitation of everyone else – we feel a sense of loneliness.”
I should note that this book is best read like you’re reading a manga or watching an anime. In my experience with manga and anime, it can be theatrical in its depictions of emotions. Committee is like that; some of the humour and Momoko’s emotional responses feel exaggerated. For me, this sometimes took me out of the reading experience; I could see the anime-like visuals in my head for those scenes, but it felt odd in a written form.
Overall, this is a great book for readers looking for a heartwarming story focused on food and honest emotional conversations. It’s also perfect for a cosy upcoming Christmas holiday period and/or if you are looking for something to help you hit your reading goal before the end of the year!
Thank you to Simon and Schuster Australia who provided a copy of the novel in exchange for a review.
Review by Priscilla
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