This book’s distinctive style charmed me immediately; each chapter begins with a recipe and fades from the description of the preparation into the evolving story of the life of the narrator’s Aunt Tita. Tita, as the youngest daughter of her mother, Mama Elena, is fated to never marry and spend her life taking care of her mother into her old age. Tita rages against this unfair fate, questioning the wisdom of this family tradition which leaves the youngest daughter with no family to take care of her in her own old age. And to whom will she pass down the family recipes and home remedies she learns from the beloved family cook Nacha? To complicate matters, since he cannot marry her, Tita’s love, Pedro, chooses to marry her sister in order to be near to her.

I loved Esquivel’s narration, and the over-the-top imagery and magical elements - flooding caused by tears, and the way Tita’s emotions become infused into her food and affect the people who eat it. In a classically ‘me’ move, I never really bought into the Tita/Pedro romance, which made a lot of the story surrounding their love hard to get invested in. I’m not sure whether their interest in each other was really meant to be based flimsily on nothing (which makes some sense given they fall for each other at a young age, and maybe they are more in love with the idea of each other than actually aware of each other’s personalities) or if it was meant to be a strong romance that just occurred too much off-screen for me to feel it. Despite that qualm, I was quite immersed in this novel’s unique style and evocative imagery.