The Baker's Apprentice
Judith Hendricks, 2005
HarperCollins
372 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060726188
Summary
The sequel to Judith Ryan Hendricks' bestselling debut novel, Bread Alone.
Having found her calling, Wynter Morrison is blissful about her new career in Seattle as a baker—herishing the long days spent making bread and the comforting rhythms of the Queen Street Bakery. Still, she struggles with the legacy of her failed marriage and with her new boyfriend Mac's reluctance to share his mysterious past.
When Mac abruptly leaves Seattle, Wyn again feels abandoned and betrayed, at least until intimate letters arrive in which Mac at last reveals his deepest secrets. But the more she learns about her absent lover, the more Wyn discovers about herself—and when tragedy threatens, she will have to decide if there is a place for Mac in this new life she has made. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Santa Clara Valley, California, USA
• Currently—lives in Sante Fe, New Mexico
A former journalist, copywriter, computer instructor, travel agent, waitress, and baker, Judith Ryan Hendricks is the author of several novels, including the bestseller Bread Alone, which first introduced readers to Wynter Morrison. (Adapted from the publisher.)
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Her own words:
• I was born in Silicon Valley when it was known as the Santa Clara Valley, or, more poetically, the Valley of Heart’s Delight, because it was a lovely, bucolic place known for its orchards and sleepy small towns. Which means if you have any mathematical ability at all, you can figure out that I’m older than I act.
• I had a boringly happy childhood in a middle-class suburban family with my parents, who recently celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary, and my younger brother. My mother instilled in me a love of reading, and I branched out from there into writing, although it took me a while to get serious about it.
• The first thing I remember writing, when I was about 7 years old, was a story about a family whose Christmas tree went missing. That was followed by a few plays coauthored with my best friend, Lynn Davis, and performed in her garage to a captive audience of intimidated younger kids. The plays were mostly outer space/cowboy stories—don’t ask. In junior high it was gothic romance thrillers, and high school was given over to bad poetry about the varsity basketball team. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Hendricks rolls out a delicious sequel in Baker’s Apprentice... Prepare to have your appetite teased and stimulated, often.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Bread remains a significant metaphor for life in Hendricks's warm and savory if somewhat predictable sequel to her debut novel, Bread Alone (2001). In the fall of 1989, Wynter Morrison, now a full partner in Seattle's funky Queen Street Bakery, is still waiting for her divorce settlement to become final. The former L.A. socialite, empowered by the lessons she's learned working with bread, takes on a new responsibility: teaching Tyler Adler, an angry ex-cheerleader, about the joys and perils of baking. Meanwhile, Wyn's relationship with bartender Mac McLeod, a frustrated writer, is in trouble: "Throw some sex into the mix and it's like putting too much yeast in bread. It's all very fizzy and light and wonderful, but then it rises too high and can't support its own weight and the whole thing falls flat." Then Mac suddenly takes off, retreating to a small town where he struggles to overcome writer's block and deal with an old tragedy that has affected his romance with Wyn. When Mac returns, Wyn faces a future that might not include bread baking, and the couple learns that a recipe for life without love is totally useless. Bakers will welcome the recipes (such as for Capuccino Hazelnut Scones) that Hendricks includes.
Publishers Weekly
Readers first met Wynter Morrison in Hendricks's novel Bread Alone. Wyn is back, and she and Mac have developed a relationship she only dreamed of before. With Ellen, Wyn is running the bakery, enduring all the challenges as she continues to learn the art of bread baking. When they hire Maggie, a cake designer, the tension starts to mount. Meanwhile, Mac has sent a manuscript to a New York agent. He goes off to Alaska to work on it, leaving Wyn hurt, angry, and in a tailspin. When confronted by a threat to the bakery, Wyn draws on an inner strength she didn't realize she possessed. The novel gains momentum as the story moves along. Hendricks has created another engaging tale of modern life in Seattle. Fans of strong female characters will appreciate the cast who populate this novel. Recommended for public libraries. —Robin Nesbitt, Columbus Metropolitan Lib., OH.
Library Journal
Readers who loved Wynter and Mac in Bread Alone (2001) will be glad to know that Hendricks cooks up a fulfilling second helping in this engaging sequel.... Hendricks' latest expresses the same heartfelt and committed love, sense of community, and pervasive kindness via fabulously cool and competent heroes. Highly recommended for both romance and women's fiction fans. —Neal Wyat.
Booklist
A sequel of sorts to Hendricks's anemic Bread Alone (2003) features the same implausible characters. Wynter Morrison, once the miserable wife of a rich man, now kneads bread in a hip bakery and flirts with disaster in the form of Mac, a freewheeling bartender. Of course he loves her. Doesn't he show up every once in a while to kiss her six ways from Sunday and pick globs of dough out of her disheveled hair? Who could ask for anything more? Not Wynter. She happily tends to the needs of the baker's regulars, like old Mrs. Gunnerson, who complains there aren't any doughnuts and packs her own teabag. The brand is duly noted, along with much other trivia that studs the practically nonexistent plot. Yet Wynter's days aren't uneventful: the bakery toilet has a broken link in the flapper-valve chain. Its dangling ends must be reconnected somehow ("I go back to the register to get a paper clip"). There are no bananas. And still no plot. The tide of Seattle life flows through the neighborhood: starving artists, a merchant marine contingent, thrift-shop patrons, the homeless, a few punkers, an occasional condo resident. Mac heads for the Yukon and writes back about the austere glory of the country where everyone goes to get lost—but, hey, he wants to find himself, a search aided by aging hippie queen Rhiannon Blue, who sells mooseburgers and reads tarot cards. Should he go back to Seattle? Every time he eats bread, he thinks of Wyn. But a man must do what a man must do—whatever that is. Lackluster atmosphere still doesn't make up for lack of a plot. Wynter frets: Did he leave because she was pushy, controlling, emotional? Maybe she can chat with her glamorpuss girlfriend CM or straighten out Tyler,a troubled teenager who serves in the shop. Uh-oh. The bakery's building is for sale. Can gentrification be far off? A whole-grain never-never-land romance of amiable stereotypes.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The dictionary defines apprentice as one who learns by practical experience, a beginner, a learner. The word has as its root the Latin verb apprehendere, meaning to grasp or seize. How does this relate to the story and to whom does it apply?
2. Maggie is both abrasive and pathetic. How does she affect the other women at the bakery? What makes her different from Tyler, who can also be abrasive and pathetic?
3. Mac finds an escape in music. What do some of the other characters use to block unpleasant realities?
4. Wyn takes a kind of perverse pride in being different from her mother. But do they share any traits? Are their any parallels in their lives?
5. Wyn likes to believe that the crossed wires in her relationship with Mac are all due to his inability to communicate, but are there times when she is less than forthcoming about her thoughts or feelings? How has a disastrous first marriage shaped her attitudes and perceptions?
6. As one thing after another goes wrong for Mac, he resurrects his old dream of escaping to Alaska. How would the story's outcome have been different if he'd gotten there?
7. The people that he meets in Beaverton, Y.T., are an odd collection of souls who all seem to have secrets in their past. How do they impact his struggle to come to terms with his own history?
8. In her senior class, Tyler would have been voted most likely to...?
9. Wyn isn't particularly family oriented. What is it about Tyler that gets to her?
10. Two themes of The Baker's Apprentice—bread as a metaphor for life and reconciliation with the past—were also dealt with in Bread Alone. Compare the ways that these themes (or others) play out in both books.
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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