Review: Like Water for Chocolate

Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Month Read In: April 2022

Challenge: 

GirlXOXO Monthly Motif April 2021: Books on the Menu

PopSugar 2021: Best Seller from 1990s

PopSugar 2022: Latinx Author

Methodology: Audiobook read by Kate Reading, via Audible

Genre- Romance: Magical Realism

Like most 90s teens, I had heard this phrase but had no clue what it meant. See, there was this movie. And it had a racy movie poster and was rated R (Restricted). Which meant my community would never think of letting their children watch it. Oh. And the Internet wasn't really an 'everywhere' thing. We didn't have Google to look it up.

Characters: This was really good, with maybe one problem, which I cannot even put my finger on. Every part of character development for the purposes of the story was well laid out. I felt like I knew them all. 9

Atmosphere: This was less good, mediocre really, but the good things prevailed. Since the story was character driven, the settings are only as fleshed out as much as is necessary and no more. 6

Writing: This was quite intriguing. The book is referred to as 'a novel in monthly installments' and it is something I tried to research, but everything I came across referenced only Like Water for Chocolate. 12 chapters, one for each month of the year. Were these chapters published in a magazine a month at a time, did Esquivel just decide to call the chapters after the months of the year? It was an interesting format and while I have never seen anything like it before and have not found any other reference to it, the method has no bearing on the writing whatsoever. 

It does not mean that the first chapter takes place wholly in the month of January and the last chapter takes place completely in December. It breaks Tita's life into the chapters or 'months' of living. The story starts in January, the beginning of the year, the beginning of her story. By the 'summer months', Tita is with Dr. Brown, being cared for in his home and thriving the way life does in the summer. When we get to fall and the end of Tita's life, her story, we come to the point in the year where life goes dormant, Tita's included. I truly cannot think of the best way to explain what this format does for the story, how it keeps the plot going using the months to represent the stages of a person's life. But it was wonderful. I didn't even realize it until as I started to write this review. I rated Writing as a 9.

Plot: Plot is a tricky thing to articulate when it is a life story. Does someone's life actually have plot? In mysteries you are looking for the who or how dunit, thrillers is wondering how they're getting out of it, romance... I am not going there. Here in Like Water for Chocolate, life and all the things that come with it are the plot. Marriage denial, the revolution, a sister running away, a love choosing someone else, parents passing away, a kind person saving another from mental abuse and the magical realism that is Tita's cooking... Wow. Let's just throw some crazy ass mysticism in there while we're at it! I rated the plot as a 7 as it was not groundbreaking by any means, but still enjoyable. Except for some key things that actually play into the Intrigue score...

Intrigue: For the most part, I kept going because I wanted to find out how Tita would finish out her life, but at the same time I didn't understand how Pedro could actually love Tita for reals. How did she not see that his behavior was not love? How could she think that these insane possessive and toxic traits were true love? There were so many red flags! I'm not actually happy with how they ended. Breaking free from him and the hold on her would have been better, but I suppose a different era and time, this was acceptable and what people thought love was. It's quite sickening to me now. Intrigue was a grudgingly high mediocre at a 6.

Logic: The time and era being different is what really keeps me from rating the logic higher. But I have the luxury of living in a more modern time where women are less likely to accept unacceptable behavior and raise our voices to be heard. En masse. Accepting Pedro's red flags really made me think much less of Tita as a person. 5

Enjoyment: All in all, it had an interesting writing style. In the 80s and 90s, so many magical realism books escaped my notice. Then again I was reading Saddle Club and Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone series at the time... So I was a little more rooted in reality based entertainment. Toni Morrison's Beloved came out a couple years before Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate and the fact that these both were quite enjoyable to me and the magical realism snuck up on me in a pleasant fashion, this has led me to believe that I should look more into this subgenre of literature. I rated my enjoyment at 7.

Averaging the category ratings gets me to a 7.0 rating. This translates to 3.5 stars, but since 7.1 would be a true 4 star, I rounded up. 

For those curious, the phrase like water for chocolate is quite common in the Latin world. They melt chocolate in boiling water, not heated milk as a lot of Americans prefer for the creaminess. If you are 'like water for chocolate', you are boiling, your passions are bubbling up inside of you, unable to be contained, controlled, and will overflow. Just ask Gertrudis. ;-)

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