But the tone of the final chapter about the wedding didn’t seem to suggest any reason for ambivalence - the description of the celebration is warm and loving and satisfied. It’s entirely possible that we’re supposed to be ambivalent about the speed with which the Bach sisters embrace their long-lost relatives, and that we’re supposed to worry that Jess and George’s marriage may not work in the long run. Jess and George seem to know that there’s a problematic imbalance to their relationship, that George is perhaps not recovered enough from his intense selfishness to marry anyone, and yet the book ends with their wedding. He sees her as a pretty treasure to be rescued, protected, and corrected for her wilder flights of fancy. While it’s clear that George values Jess and does care about her, it’s also clear that he does not see her as his equal or as his partner. The other characters in the book tend to focus on the age difference between Jess and George as the big problem, but I didn’t think that was the major obstacle to their ultimate happiness. The marriage between Jess and George was my major problem with the ending of The Cookbook Collector. We hear almost nothing about why Jess changes her mind. The aunts and cousins we meet at the end of the book seem nice enough, but their response when Jess asks how they feel about the decision to abandon Gillian is an unsatisfying “oh, well, that was a long time ago.” It felt like it should take more than that for these strangers to be embraced into the Bach family as the answer to Jess and Emily’s motherlessness - especially given that Jess is initially skeptical about the new relatives. But remember, this is a branch of the family that disowned their mother. It seemed like the reader is supposed to think that this is good for Jess and Emily, that they will be able to fill the void left by their mother’s death by reconnecting with their mother’s family. In the book’s final chapter, we see that the newfound relatives attend Jess’s small, close-friends-and-family-only wedding - one of their uncles even performs the ceremony. Their deeply religious grandparents disowned Gillian when she married Jess and Emily’s gentile father, but their newly-discovered aunt, uncle, and cousins seem happy to have found Jess and Emily. At the end of the book, Jess and Emily discover that a local Orthodox rabbi is, in fact, their uncle. The absence of Jess and Emily’s deceased mother Gillian is a recurring theme throughout the book. The reconciliation with their mother’s family I’m not saying I wanted Emily to suffer extensively for her lapse in judgement, but it felt odd for her - and the book - to move on so quickly from Veritech and to be so indifferent to its fate.Ģ. We see no fallout from her indiscretion aside from a few sentences about what happens to Veritech post-9/11. Emily just resigns from Veritech (which she was planning to do anyway) and goes to work for a Facebook-type social networking sight. But aside from a flash of guilt at Jonathan’s funeral, there are no consequences. Emily rejected this idea for Veritech because she found it morally problematic, and she knows immediately that she has done the programmer who proposed the idea a huge disservice by leaking it to Jonathan. The assumption that Emily, not Jonathan, will quit and move seems especially odd given that Veritech is more successful than ISIS throughout most of the book.Īt the end of the book, after Jonathan dies on September 11, we learn that Jonathan has stolen Veritech’s idea for an electronic surveillance program. I didn’t believe for a second that a Silicon Valley CEO would be so passive about giving up a company she helped found. Emily clearly feels reluctant to take that step, but there’s no hint that Emily has asked Jonathan to consider moving. First, there seems to be absolutely no discussion of how she and Jonathan will resolve their long-distance situation - the solution is that Emily will quit her job and move to Boston. In fact, I had three problems, which I’m going to list here.Īs the book moves along, Emily Bach becomes less and less credible as the CEO of a dynamic internet startup. I mentioned in my review that I had some problems with the ending of The Cookbook Collector.
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