I was looking forward to listening to Allegra Goodman’s newest effort even though I was not a big fan of her last book “Intuition.” While I think the Jane Austen comparison is a bit over the top, I usually enjoy Allegra’s writing and I find her Jewish characters somewhat authentic or at the very least three-dimensional, which is unusual. My sister’s scathing review of this book did dampen my enthusiasm but I gamely put on my headphones and started listening, telling myself that I’m often less discerning than my sister is and optimistically assuming that I would certainly enjoy “The Cookbook Collector” more than my previous audiobook, “Red Hook Road.” Besides, I love cookbooks so surely I would love reading about someone else who buys too many of them!

Well not only did the story move at “Red Hook Road”’s plodding pace, but the characters and their machinations actually interested me even less, if that’s possible. I have to steal a line from my sister’s review – this is Sweet Valley High all over again, with one sister who’s capable and organized and successful and another who’s fun-loving and flaky. It’s different from Sweet Valley High in that the fun-loving sister is meant to be more lovable than the anal one but never fear, here too, both sisters have men dropping at their feet like flies. I need to hold myself back here from going on yet another rant about chick lit wish-fulfillment and boring, one-dimensional Mary Sue characters who are drooled on by all the men around them. Mmmmpppphhh! Mmmmppphhh! That’s me, putting virtual duct tape on my mouth.

The book opens with the anal sister, Emily, giving her younger flaky sister Jess a gift of a designer suit. Okay. You’ve been sisters for 23 years. Why is it a surprise at this point that Jess, the bohemian graduate student, is not exactly enthused by designer suits? It wasn’t a surprise to me after just a few minutes of listening to the book. Is Emily so completely clueless about her sister? To add insult to injury, Emily proceeds to push Jess the struggling student into investing in Emily’s company but refuses to lend her the money. Wow, this older sister just gets better and better – she can spend money on a designer suit Jess won’t even like but refuses to lend Jess money for an investment that’s supposed to assure her future? Am I supposed to sympathize at all with this character and her self-absorption to the point of idiocy?

This was pretty early in the book and I wasn’t particularly motivated to keep listening but I plodded on. So great, now we have George, the bookstore owner and Jess’s boss, who is – wait for it – secretly in love with Jess. George is another rip-roaring character – handsome, naturally, and also brooding and cynical and disenchanted with life though his grumpy exterior hides…oh, whatever. Allegra gives him a few eccentric quirks in an effort to make him three-dimensional and maybe likable, but sadly it doesn’t work. And then there were the bombastic “Bialystocker” Hasidic rabbis just desperate to recruit more Jews – ouch, I cringed every time they opened their mouths. Come on, Allegra, I found myself pleading, where are the cookbooks already? Give me a reason to keep listening!

Well, several more (way too many, actually) unlikable characters and uninteresting subplots later, we finally arrived at the cookbooks. Isn’t halfway through the book a little late to introduce what the title suggests is a central theme? At this point, I was so disenchanted with the book that even the long-awaited cookbooks couldn’t revive my interest. Which is fine, because the cookbooks actually didn’t play a major role in the end. Instead, there was a whole lot of stuff about IPOs and start-ups and the dot-com bust, which don’t represent favorite reading interests of mine. And the subplot about Jess and the radical environmentalism – maybe I was spacing out too much (highly likely actually), but I never really understood the urgency of Jess’s camping out in a redwood tree.

Now what could possibly make this bad book even worse? Well, how about a series of highly improbable coincidences and neatly tied loose ends? And throwing in a few hundred clichés? Some sappy declarations of love? Best of all – the highly original use of 9/11 as a literary device? Yup – this book has it all.

For plot development, multifaceted characters, and literary style, I probably would have been better off reading an actual cookbook.