Cleaving Leaves a Bad Taste in Reader's Mouth

Author:  Julie Powell
Title:  Cleaving:  A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession
Publisher:  Little, Brown and Co.

If you loved the MOVIE Julie & Julia and were thinking this would be a charming little sequel about a sweet little couple—you could not be more wrong. If you read the BOOK Julie & Julia and wondered if its author was still hosting her profanity-laced pity party—you are absolutely right. Only more so. Much more.

In fact, the overriding flaw of Cleaving is that it suffers from an overdose of "more." The whole thing is TMI. Too. Much. Information. About . . .

Julie's sex life. Not with her husband, you understand, but with her louse of a lover and some nameless guy off the street and …and … ick.

The art of butchery. It was actually quite interesting for a good long time, but eventually the fulsome detail of every tiny step involved in breaking down a side of beef made my eyes glaze over.

Her self-destructive, self-absorbed attitude. Purposeless and pitiful, Julie wanders through life with no clear direction other than the desire to learn how to make steak from cow. I suppose when your moral compass is Buffy the Vampire Slayer it's no wonder you're lost, but Julie's determination to destroy her family, friends, and (most of all) herself makes for grim reading.

The back half of the book follows Julie on a sort of meaty Grand Tour as she travels to different countries to see their meat markets, cattle operations, etc. I'd classify this section as ‘filler' not unlike the stuff in inferior sausages. I hoped seeing the world might give Julie a clue that it does not revolve around her, but she managed to keep her focus firmly fixed on herself.

In the end, nothing much has changed and nothing is really resolved. Yes, Julie has learned to be a butcher, but while she can carve a cow with ease, her marriage—and her life—has pretty much been hacked to pieces. 

It's such a shame. She's a talented writer, able to make certain scenes come to life. Her descriptions of the back room at the butcher shop are so clear I practically felt the need to wash meat "schmutz" off my face after reading them. Not to mention the recipes scattered throughout the prose—one or two sound delicious—but even they don't make up for 300 pages of wasted potential.

Maybe if the author found another subject to write about—anything other than herself—she could get her nose out of her navel and give us a story worth reading. Until then, stick to the movie version. As far as this book goes, I'm giving it two thumbs down.