The description of Mrs. Quinn’s Rise to Fame gives off major cozy vibes: Jenny, a woman of 77, happily part of a couple for 59 years with her beloved Bernard, 83, feels a little restless settling further and further into the undeviating routine of their retirement. She takes an unexpected opportunity to apply to be a contestant on the television show “Britain Bakes” (yes, think The Great British Bake-off), to see if life still offers the potential for meaning and adventure. She enjoys the new-found independence of her choice, but it brings up some old memories that begin to affect both her and her relationship…

It sounded ideal: I like baking and recipes, and I like seeing older people charging towards life rather than sinking into it. But…I’m going to quote another Goodreads reviewer here:

“I feel tricked. I wanted ‘elderly woman finds herself through entering a baking contest.’ Instead, I got ‘elderly woman reminisces about the most traumatic thing that ever happened to her (which she’s kept a secret for 60 years) while participating in a baking contest.'”

The trouble started for me when Jenny decides to keep her application a secret from her husband until she knows for sure that she got in, or at least has a good chance. I didn’t have such a problem with that—you don’t want to get people’s hopes up, or deal with their expectations, for that matter—but the way she went about it was inconsiderate and rather thoughtless (not to mention incredibly inept), and leads her husband to believe that she’s hiding something serious, like a life-threatening illness. And when she realizes that is the conclusion he has drawn, she doesn’t come clean and put his mind at ease! I began to like and respect Jenny a little less.

Then we discover that there’s a much bigger secret she’s been keeping from Bernard (and everyone else) for the entire 59 years of her marriage, as the baking of some of her old family recipes brings up memories of her life at 17. She claims that she has kept the secret all this time in order to protect him, but we figure out pretty quickly that it’s to protect herself from being looked at differently by him and by her other close family members. Which didn’t track at first for me, because the secret would explain so much—but once I realized in what way the trauma has shaped their subsequent lives, I liked Jenny even less.

I would really, really like to go into the specifics of why I was kind of horrified by the ramifications of her secret, but I don’t want to give away a central plot point. I will say that I felt like she robbed her beloved (and charmingly portrayed) husband of his agency in a particularly cruel way by never taking him into her confidence.

But…I did thoroughly enjoy the baking narrative, with its descriptions of such delectables as Battenburg Cake and Treacle Tarts; the interactions with her extended family and with the people she met and in some cases befriended on the show; and the descriptions of the filming of the show’s production. Reading those parts immersed me in the bake-off experience, and if the book had been exclusively about that I think I might have liked it better. Many people gave this book five stars, with few being as curmudgeonly as I have been here. Perhaps I am overreacting…but I didn’t like the lies, the implications of Jenny’s emotions about the traumatic event, or the way it finally resolves, which seemed a little too pat.

You will have to decide for yourself whether you want to allow yourself to be whisked away into this story, pun intended.

An addendum: This is my 500th post on The Book Adept Blog!