I truly found this book to be an engaging read with a lot of interesting depth. Sourdough by Robin Sloan is a wonderful book, full of beautiful writing, fascinating characters, and a lot of subtle layers in the plot. But who are these people, exactly? Jen's Review When Lois discovers another, more secret market, aiming to fuse food and technology, a whole other world opens up. Soon she is baking loaves daily and taking them to the farmer's market, where an exclusive close-knit club runs the show. Lois becomes the unlikely hero tasked to care for it, bake with it and keep this needy colony of microorganisms alive. When her favourite sandwich shop closes up, the owners leave her with the starter for their mouthwatering sourdough bread. Despite an ending that doesn’t quite hang with the rest of the novel, Sourdough is likely the most interesting tale you’ll read about bread this year.Lois Clary, a software engineer at a San Francisco robotics company, codes all day and collapses at night. Sourdough lives in that interstitial state where it’s not quite magical realism but not quite not, either. Sloan has a delightful touch with descriptions – a panel of chefs “looked like a committee of harvest gods drawn from all of the pantheons,” for example – and a deft approach to giving Lois life. Sourdough isn’t as treacle-y as that sounds, though. The starter takes Lois on a journey from a tech worker who subsists on nutrient slurry because it’s efficient to a foodie who can find wonder in seeing the stars. The soup is too complicated.)Īll of the generations of symbiotic bacteria and yeasts in this starter have grown into a rudimentary intelligence, one that responds to stimulus in almost human-like ways. One night, they tell her they are leaving the country, but before they go, they give her the means to make her own bread. After months in the software engineering pressure cooker, all that makes Lois feel human is the soup and bread they deliver to her door. The catalyst is a crock of sourdough starter given to her by two brothers, whose nomadic backgrounds cloak them in mystery. She’s just moved to town from a perfectly fine hometown in the Midwest, lured out to the coast by money and a tiny urge for change. In Robin Sloan’s Sourdough, Lois is a software engineer at one of San Francisco’s hottest tech companies. Sourdough, Robin Sloan ( MCD Farrar, Straus and Giroux 978-0-8, $26.00, 272pp, hc) September 2017.

Sourdough sloan