SEPTEMBER 2017 - AudioFile
When Lois Clary, a Bay Area software engineer, becomes guardian of a unique sourdough starter, she’s drawn into the surprising underworld of artisan food producers and farmers’ markets. Narrator Thérèse Plummer’s lively performance highlights Lois’s cautious curiosity and delight of discovery as she transforms from non-cooking AI geek to sought-after baker. This quirky story is well served by Plummer’s enthusiasm, although her characterizations can sometimes sound forced, especially when portraying the brothers who give Lois the starter. The audiobook contains special bonus material, including samples of the haunting Magz music (written by the author) that helps Lois’s starter thrive. Ari Fliakos reads several supplementary emails from the high-tech food company that has an unrelenting and possibly nefarious interest in Lois and her starter. C.B.L. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
07/10/2017
San Francisco’s technology and food cultures collide and collude in Sloan’s latest novel, following Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. Robotics programmer Lois Clary subsists on an unappetizing diet that includes frequent servings of Tetra Pak–wrapped nutritional gel until she discovers the delicious, restorative comfort food sold at Clement Street Soup and Sourdough, a makeshift take-out enterprise operated by two immigrant brothers. Visa issues force the brothers to leave the country, but before they go they give Lois a crock of sourdough starter along with a CD of the music of their people, the mysterious Mazg. Lois’s first attempt at baking bread produces an imperfect loaf with cracks in the crust that form the lines of a human face. Improving with practice, she earns a coveted place at Marrow Fair—an innovative farmer’s market offering Chernobyl honey, microbiotic lembas, and algorithmically optimized bagels—but there’s one condition. Marrow Fair’s manager wants “robot bread.” Lois must figure out how to program a robotic arm to perform kitchen tasks that require a delicate touch. Lois also faces another, more worrisome problem: the starter has become temperamental and demanding: underfed it looks depressed; overfed it spreads, grows tendrils, and forms faces with disturbing expressions. Through narrative and email correspondence, Sloan captures contemporary work environments, current reality, and future trends. It’s a busy novel, crammed with some excellent bits (how robotics work, how farmers markets work) and some bits that are just creative hyperactivity (like the biogeneration of lembas). The book offers much to savor, but like the starter it proves rich and buoyant at first, then overreaches. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
"Delicious fun . . . a novel as delectable as its namesake." —Elizabeth Hand, The Washington Post
“A culinary delight . . . Sourdough is the story we all secretly dream about. Could we leave our mundane lives and take a leap of faith in the direction of our newfound passion? Sloan takes readers on a thought-provoking journey to answer that question and asks them to consider the irony that it takes a living concoction of yeast and microbes to force Lois to consider living her best life.” —Lincee Ray, The Associated Press
“[Sourdough] plunges through so much terrain: microbial nations, assimilation and tradition, embodied consciousness and the crisis of the tech industry, all without losing the light, sweet, ironic Sloanian voice familiar from Mr. Penumbra’s, a plot that makes the book a page-turner and a laugh-out-louder, with sweetness and romance and tartness and irony in perfect balance. What a great book, seriously.” —Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing
"Sloan’s prose is sharp, and his critiques of capitalism, Silicon Valley and foodie culture are finely cut." —Everdeen Mason, The Washington Post
“Fascinating . . . insightful . . . One of the more cogent novels this year on the fertile tensions that exist between culture and technology” —Andy Newman, The Atlantic
"If you’ve ever been confused about what’s artificial and what’s authentic—can you really tell anymore?—Sourdough is a book for you." —Jeffery Gleaves, The Paris Review Daily
“Sourdough rises like a good loaf . . . Beautiful . . . Fight Club meets The Great British Bake Off . . . [Sourdough] knows as much about the strange extremes of food as Mr. Penumbra did about the dark latitudes of the book community. [Sloan’s] voice . . . fits so beautifully into the time and place and moment he is writing about.” —Jason Sheehan, NPR Books
“Baking, foodie culture, and a club made up of women named Lois all figure in this charming story about a coder slogging away at a trendy tech company. When friends give her some sourdough starter and she begins making her own bread, everything changes.” —Entertainment Weekly
"Delightful . . . equal measures techie and foodie fodder, a perfect parable for our times." –San Francisco Magazine
"As he did in Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan will have readers looking for magic in the mundane." –Nora Horvath, Real Simple
"Filled with crisp humor and weird but endearing characters . . . At once a parody of startup culture and a foodie romp . . . [A] delight, perfect for those who like a little magic with their meals." —Booklist (starred review)
" A wild, geeky, flour-dusted ride through the oddball food and techie communities of San Francisco . . . A winning story that—like its namesake bread—carries a satisfying tang.” —Shelf Awareness
“[Sourdough] fuses the story of worker alienation and embodied consciousness and microbiomes and microbiology with robotics in a beautiful way . . . A Robert Pirsig or Armisted Maupin kind of novel, but it’s about robotic arms and sourdough bread!” —Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing on KDNK Radio
“How many novels can boast an obstreperous sourdough starter as a key character? A delightful and heartfelt read.” —Library Journal
"Sloan's comic but smart tone never flags, and Lois is an easy hero to root for." —Kirkus Reviews
"Through narrative and email correspondence, Sloan captures contemporary work environments, current reality, and future trends . . . [Sourdough] offers much to savor." —Publishers Weekly
“Sloan has imagined a funny and curious novel unlike anything else, a perfect combination of self-discovery through all sorts of weird passions. Like truly good sourdough, this namesake is the perfectly tangy, chewy, and airy addition to anyone’s reading list—minus the gluten and calories, of course.” —Chika Gujarathi, BookPage
“On the crust, Sourdough is a buddy book . . . But slice a little deeper, and you will discover, Sourdough is a novel about work . . . Sloan's sense of place is palpable, and his prose is dusted with luxurious lines to be savored . . .” —David LaBounty, Dallas Morning News
“In his novel Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Sloan unraveled a mystery about a web designer who takes a job in a peculiar all-night Bay area book shop. New technology clashed, then melded, with classic history. Sourdough promises a similar sort of tech and analog mashup, in this case involving the food industry: a software engineer learns to bake bread and uncovers a secret underground market.” —The Miami Herald, Fall Books Preview
Library Journal
08/01/2017
In the buoyant, touch-of-magic prose that characterized his Alex Award-winning debut, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, Sloan introduces us to Lois Clary, a software engineer at an ambitious, San Francisco-based robotics company, whose life gets fantastically redirected by a sourdough starter. Lois is bequeathed the starter by Beoreg and Chaiman, proprietors of Clement Street Soup and Sourdough, who light up her 'round-the-clock work schedule with their wonderful food until they're forced to leave town fast owing to visa problems. (The brothers belong to the fabled Mazg community, a bit of whimsy that adds to the novel's charm.) Soon, Lois is planning her life around baking bread, building the perfect oven and eventually getting invited to join a mysterious new food emporium that aims to redefine how we eat. She even works out a deal to buy a robot arm from her company to help make her in-demand bread, which is significant; Lois isn't rebelling against technology but moving forward in her own way. In her quest, she gets help from a club of women all named Lois and enticingly still-in-touch Beoreg. VERDICT How many novels can boast an obstreperous sourdough starter as a key character? A delightful and heartfelt read. [See Prepub Alert, 3/3/17.]—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
SEPTEMBER 2017 - AudioFile
When Lois Clary, a Bay Area software engineer, becomes guardian of a unique sourdough starter, she’s drawn into the surprising underworld of artisan food producers and farmers’ markets. Narrator Thérèse Plummer’s lively performance highlights Lois’s cautious curiosity and delight of discovery as she transforms from non-cooking AI geek to sought-after baker. This quirky story is well served by Plummer’s enthusiasm, although her characterizations can sometimes sound forced, especially when portraying the brothers who give Lois the starter. The audiobook contains special bonus material, including samples of the haunting Magz music (written by the author) that helps Lois’s starter thrive. Ari Fliakos reads several supplementary emails from the high-tech food company that has an unrelenting and possibly nefarious interest in Lois and her starter. C.B.L. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2017-06-20
A listless coder discovers inspiration—and some unusual corners of the Bay Area—via a batch of sourdough starter.Lois, the narrator of Sloan's second novel (Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, 2012), works at a San Francisco robotics firm, where long hours move her to regularly order in from a sandwich shop. The place is peculiar—it's delivery-only, and the two brothers who own it are vague about their background ("Mazg," they say)—but the food is amazing, especially the sourdough bread. When the brothers leave town, they eagerly bestow their sourdough starter on their "number one eater," and though Lois is hapless in the kitchen, she soon masters baking so well her loaves catch the attention of her employer's in-house chef and, eventually, an elite invite-only farmers market in Alameda. Early on, the novel reads like a lighthearted redemption-through-baking tale with a few quirks: the starter seems to have moods of its own and the loaves' crusts crack into facelike visages. But in time the story picks up—and becomes somewhat burdened by—a strenuously oddball supporting cast and various allegorical commentaries about human virtues amid the rush to process and automate everything, including food. (One of Lois' coding challenges is teaching a robotic arm to crack an egg.) Among the characters are a collector of vintage restaurant menus, members of a club for women named Lois, the Mazg brothers' forefathers, and a fellow baker who plays Grateful Dead bootlegs to encourage his own starter. Sloan's comic but smart tone never flags, and Lois is an easy hero to root for, inquisitive and sensitive as she is. But the absurdities of the plot twists (in part involving her starter's need to acquire a "warrior spirit") ultimately feel less cleverly offbeat than hokey. "I oscillated between finding this vision totally ridiculous and finding it deadly serious," Lois bemoans at one point. But the story increasingly leans toward the former. Fluffy but overbaked.
