August 22, 2025

Mrs. Quinn’s Rise to Fame by Olivia Ford (2024)

August 11th was our first week back from our summer break!

We faced a variety of technological issues that could have derailed us: my computer would not work, and I had to meet via the phone (a challenge even without my vision loss!); another member ‘s hearing aids were not properly working with her zoom connection, and so forth, but we were not deterred!

Our shared generosity and good humor, our delight at making it back to the group, reminds me of how important our book discussions are, and how important community is. We do our best to show up for one another, regardless of how many pages were each able to read between caretaking and the overwhelming tasks I lump under “maintenance” of our aging bodies and living spaces, gardens, responsibilities to beloved family and friends, and simply managing in these complicated and upsetting times.

And the book? Well, we agreed it was a distraction from the chaos of local and world politics and and frequent despair.

We enjoyed some parts about it but we also found the writing was not equal to what we usually encounter. We are experienced readers, not critics, and yet reading this novel reminded us of what we often take for granted in the books we select: we assume excellent writing, or at least writing that does not make us glitch as we read. This book’s prose did not impress us, and we wondered if the author’s work as a television producer influenced the style.

The novel tells the story of Mrs Jenny Quinn, who, after fifty-nine years of marriage, as her husband Bernard’s health declines, and her friends’ lives are increasingly focused on grandchildren—which Jenny and Bernard do not have—secretly applies to be a contestant on the prime-time TV show “Britain Bakes.”

While she delights in the experience, the competition starts to unearth memories buried decades ago. Chocolate teacakes remind her of a furtive errand involving a wedding ring; sugared doughnuts call up a stranger’s kind act; a simple cottage loaf brings back the moment her life changed forever. Jenny struggles to keep a lid on a long-concealed secret that she has kept from her husband.

As readers, our group expects major characters to learn or develop from their experiences, and we sometimes experience our own expansion of insight, humanity, or knowledge as readers. In this case, we were less transformed or expanded by the reading than we might have hoped, but we, as always, brought to it our own interests and biases and the book thus that created an enjoyable discussion.

Some of us are bakers and enjoyed the recipes even as we would probably not not bake such sugary confections. Some enjoy the “Great British Bake Off” and appreciated the behind the scenes descriptions of competition.

Most of us liked Jenny Quinn, though we differed in our understanding of her secrecy from her beloved Bernard. Why did she never tell him why she did not want children? And why did she keep her application to the baking competition a secret?

We differed among ourselves as to the deeper causes of her secrecy. Was she so wounded by her experience as a seventeen year old giving birth in a home for unwed mothers that she was terrified Bernard would not marry her if she told him about that experience? And was she right that he would not love her if he knew the truth? We felt surely he would not have have stopped loving her or left her after years of close marriage if she confided in him. Even those of us who tried to understand or at least not judge her had a hard time understanding the lesser secrecy regarding the baking competition which made little sense to us as readers. Jenny’s total naivete regarding social media was also difficult for us to accept, especially given the presence of young relatives in her life.

The serious plot of Jenny’s past experience hit some of us by surprise in the ways it was dropped into the plot. Unlike for example Claire Keegan’s fiction (which we also read for our group), this novel did not increase our historical knowledge or particularly move us.

I doubt that any of us will recommend this novel to our friends, but we all agreed it was a nice distraction from the news, a good enough summer “beach read,” and we really enjoyed being back from our summer vacation and reading and talking together again.
Remember! We’d love you to read with us! Send us your thoughts! Either here or through email!