Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments with Recipes, Romances, and Home...

Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments with Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies | Laura Esquivel | Deliciously juicy

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Like Water for Cho...

	Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments with Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies Laura Esquivel Anchor, 1994 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 437 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Earthy, magical, and utterly charming, this tale of family life in tum-of-the-century Mexico became a best-selling phenomenon with its winning blend of poignant romance and bittersweet wit.

Mystical, Erotic, and Delicious

Get ready to be engulfed in the mouth-watering aroma of delicious Mexican dishes and a tale of romance, mystique, and an all-consuming passion. Laura Esquivel's beautiful novel, Like Water for Chocolate, is a combination of simple prose and the charm of magic realism that makes it a delightful and fascinating read.
The novel encompasses the life of Tita de la Garza, the third daughter of Elena, from her unusual birth to the spectacular event of her death. Intertwining with Tita's story are monthly recipes that are served during the course of her life and have had significant impacts on Tita and the people around her. The dominance of food throughout the novel is further embellished by Esquivel's use of magical realism. Taking a role itself, the appearance of food or the ingredients that are used to prepare food instigate a myriad of events in the story. Tita's birth is explained as being triggered by her cries within Elena's womb due to chopped onion, and the dishes that Tita prepares carry a magical power that could induce tears or passion once consumed, such as the "Chabela Wedding Cake" and "Quail in Rose Petal Sauce."
Thwarted of the chance to marry her only love, Pedro Muzquiz, Tita transfers her emotions into food and allows her cooking to express the concealed feelings she has for him. Just as strong as her passion is for food, Tita's and Pedro's ardor for each other surpasses all boundaries of time and familial obligations. The fierce passion of their love is so powerful that it magically ignites them at the final climactic moment of their joining, causing a great fire and ultimately concluding Tita's life.
Overall, Like Water for Chocolate is a sumptuous and sensual tale that will evoke a sense of longing in the reader's heart and appetite.

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Deliciously juicy

"Like Water for Chocolate" was a romantic food novel that I was required to read for my college English class. The book was very realistic at times but would have certain elements playfully exaggerated with a fantasy twist. It was unique how the Laura Esquivel incorporated recipes to go with chapters of the book. This novel was written beautifully and will leave you in a half fantasy world of love surrounded in a deep aura of Spanish foods. It truly transports you to another world. Recommended for the romantic. :)

Quirky but fun all the same

A delightful little book, Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate is almost a modern-day fairy tale. Told in monthly installments, the novel is simultaneously story and cookbook, filled with both recipes and home remedies and as well as the story of Tita, our heroine, who was born, raised and taught in the kitchen, and who has the amazing ability to cook her emotions into her marvelous recipes. Tita's story is one of longing, love and the need to be her own person; to escape the tyrannical presence of her mother and create her own life with the man she loves. It's a relatively fast read, but enjoyable all the same.

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An endearing little book

A friend of mine lent me this book a few months ago and I never got around to reading it. I gave it back to her when we graduated from college, but I still wanted to read it, so I bought a copy. It didn't sit around for too long this time; I read it in a day.

Tita grew up in the kitchen, surrounded by her love of food. She is overjoyed when she falls in love with a man, until she learns that as the youngest daughter, she is intended to stay home and take care of her mother - forever. This little book, which is told in twelve chapters, each a different month of the year, with a recipe for each one, is another endearing exercise in magical realism from a Latin American storyteller.

The reader knows straight away that Tita will never be married. This gives the entire story a bittersweet feel; we know her relationships aren't going to succeed before they even happen. Regardless, I did find it charming. Tita is lovely and I grew to care for her very quickly. Her family is very peculiar and all members have strictly defined personalities. At first, it seems Mama Elena is a stereotypically horrible mother, but later on we learn that there is more to her story, too.

The magical realism adds a special dimension to the story. I hadn't expected it going in to the book. As I've mentioned before, I read most books without knowing anything about them because I largely read from recommendations and generally avoid reviews or even reading the back cover. The supernatural aspects make it clear that this isn't real life, but they don't take away from the universal romantic experiences that Tita endures.

The format is interesting. This book is certainly a novel, but the fact that it is split into twelve equal chapters means that it's easier to break down if you don't have much time to read. I haven't tried any of the recipes and I'm not sure that I will, particularly given that the instructions are spread throughout each chapter and are potentially hard to follow when in a hurry. If you were reading for a book club, however, it might be fun to have a small party around the book and have each member try a different recipe. At least, that's what I would do.

I would recommend this book, I think; it's a light read, but at the same time heartfelt and moving.

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IB English HL Book Review

If you enjoyed Allende's The House of the Spirits, then this is the right book for you! Much like Allende's novel, Like Water for Chocolate combines the ordinary and the supernatural in the portrayal of two young, Latino lovers living in the midst of civil war. However, Esquivel's work remains unique though her use of food in not only emphasizing her pride in the Mexican culture, but also in expressing the strong conflicting emotions that are deep within the hearts of the characters. Through the use of magical realism and the motif of food, Esquivel depicts a love story that explores the classic theme of what happens to a dream deterred.
Every chapter of the novel begins with a recipe, which serves to accentuate how the life of a traditional Mexican family is centered on the kitchen. Thus it is no surprise that the main character is no other than the youngest daughter and head chef, Tita, who is characterized as a talented young girl whose spirit is constantly broken by her mother's incessant upbraiding. Tita's lifelong pain is symbolized through the motif of onions, which appear throughout the novel during times of deep sorrow and heavy weeping. Esquivel's use of food as a motif is further evidenced by Tita's culinary masterpieces--such as the rose dish that causes its consumers to be afflicted with erotic obsession. Overall, Esquivel's originality is derived from her ability to mix the elements of cooking, erotica, and the magical realism in creating a novel that demonstrates the consequences of emotional repression. I personally recommend this novel to anyone who is looking for a love story chock-full of Hispanic culture, garnished with elements of the supernatural.

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