Sourdough

This was fun! I would highly recommend it, especially to anyone interested in programming, robots, and especially baking / bread / food in general. It will make you hungry. So many great quotes and engaging characters. “Here's a thing I believe about people my age: we are the children of Hogwarts, and more than anything, we just want to be sorted.” Ha!

One small thing that bugged me - there are a couple of points where they make fun of radiation - as in the location of their market is located in an old military facility that previously housed nuclear weapons, and at one point Lois is offered honey supposedly from “Chernobyl,” and eats it without batting an eye. The characters reactions to this are along the lines of “Eh, mutation is good for you...” Which was so weird, considering that unless this book was in a superhero universe, radiation would actually poison and kill you. Super minor, especially considering this book is basically about magical bacteria cultures.

I picked this up because the author's first book is one of my favorites. The topic is very different, so I was skeptical.

However, there was no need for skepticism though. Mr. Sloan approached the new topic with the same vision of the world as in Mr. Penumbra. Again we are in San Francisco with a young tech saavy person looking for their place in the world.

Lois is discovering that coding and robots might not be her place. She discovers a small restaurant run by two brothers who we discover are part of a little known ethnic group. They leave Lois with their sourdough culture and she is catapulted into an adventure that includes an almost unreal group of food experimentalists. She eventually uncovers her thing even though it almost ruined her.