This one has expired back to the library on me and I wasn't quite finished. But I don't think I'm going to place it on hold again, so allowing it into the "Done" stack.

I'll call this a guilty pleasure read. It had a number of qualities I find enticing:

- Minnesota (think humor about lutefisk and lutherans)
- kind of that elegiac tone that Garrison Keillor does so notably
- FOOOOOOOODDDD.
- a unique narrative structure. It's kind of like a series of short stories, each from a different narrator who knows the protagonist in some way. So it's a story kind of "about" this girl named Eva told through other people's encounters with her in their own stories. Some of the narrators show up in each other's sections, which is interesting and allows for the reader to learn some surprising things about how what direction their lives went after their section was over. In addition to each section having a different narrator, it is also framed around its own specific food. (lutefisk, pepper jelly, golden bantam sweet corn, church lady dessert bars....)

But the narrative structure, for as much as I was enjoying it, is also kind of the reason that I don't feel invested enough to check it back out and finish it.

Eva didn't really coalesce for me. Maybe she would have by the end, but by the three quarters point I wasn't feeling much momentum. Some of the narrators were less likeable than others. . . Actually, most of them were pretty unlikeable, come to think of it. Lots of swearing with a side of extramarital affairs and drugs....some pretty narrow, selfish perspectives. Which is interesting, if you think about it. I mean,to a certain extent, we are all just characters in each other's stories.

The story also started to pull punches pretty quick. You think it's going to be a fun, quirky, foodie read. And it is, but it's also ugly, tragic, and cringey at times

So anyway. I liked it. More or less. :)