Love the way you knead: how author Méabh McDonnell’s family passion for baking inspired her latest novel, Any Way You Slice It.
My earliest memory of my grandmother is her hands, rolling bread dough in flour. I remember the smell of the buttermilk, I remember the way the light caught on the breadbin and the way the flour gathered on her apron. I remember the way she didn’t need to look for anything but everything was in her hands exactly at the moment she needed it.
My grandmother baked bread every day. My mother and her sisters bake bread too. They bring it to your home when they want to welcome you. They bring cupcakes and biscuits when they are going to a party. None of them are professional bakers but all of them understand one thing: that baking is a fundamental part of life and just because you don’t bake professionally doesn’t mean you can’t be passionate about it.
That passion is what inspired the creation of Carrie Quinn, the lead of Any Way You Slice It, my new YA novel. Carrie walked out of my mind fully formed. Determined. Creative. Talented. Carrie was a culmination of all of the women in my family who taught me how to bake and she is an ode to all of the people who make baking their passion and career. Carrie is the baker my young self wished she was. She’s a testament to the version of myself that used to rent Usbourne’s Guide to Baking from the library at least once a month as a child. I once dreamt of being a baker.
A Different Dream
I found a different dream to follow, but I was able to use that knowledge and passion to create a story and a girl whose dream it was.
Carrie was my chance to write someone who was passionate and single-minded about what she wants in life. She was a complete character when I finished writing about her that first day. And when I thought about what Carrie needed, it wasn’t an opportunity to discover her talent or to learn how to do it. It was someone to stop her, someone to stand in her way and someone to drive her to the best of her very ability.
That was when Dara Harte walked into her life and into my mind. What if I wrote this girl a romance?
The rest, as they say, is history. Because I had been waiting so long to write a romance, particularly a Young Adult offering. Young Adult novels are set at that special time in a person’s life. Everything is set to extremes. It’s life and death, never and forever, do or die, love or lie. A time of transition and change that gives young people a chance to try out who they are going to be, to take their first steps into the world. It’s when they experience their first triumphs and their first disasters. And writing that time in someone’s life, it’s exciting. It is storytelling that is chock full of superlatives, big drama and bigger resolutions. It’s the kind of storytelling that is joyful and fun. And to throw in a romantic storyline? That’s my kind of writing.
Any Way You Slice It
A good romance doesn’t just make the lead fall in love with the love interest – it makes the reader fall in love with them too. That was my goal with Dara in Any Way You Slice It: create a character that readers could fall in love with. I wanted them to fall for him the way that Carrie does and to dream of baking with him and arguing with him too.
But, as a rather clever writer once wrote, the course of true love never did run smooth. And Carrie and Dara couldn’t just find each other through mutual passion for baking. They needed something more than that. They couldn’t start their story as colleagues: they had to start it as enemies. As two people who would never dream of teaming up together. And then they had to try to destroy each other before they could in any way start to fall for each other. Any good Nora Ephron fan will tell you that the love story is that much more believable if we get to see them hate each other first.
The current YA book scene is filled with stories that fulfil specific tropes. Enemies to Lovers, Second chance romance, He falls first. They are little hints, types of stories that tell the reader what to expect. As a writer, it’s my joy to deconstruct these tropes and put my own spin on them. There’s a special thrill in thinking that yours might be the first version of these stories that someone might read.
My experience of writing my first book drew on my passion for childhood stories, magic and special woodland places. It was a story about family. In writing my second, I wrote about the family you find and the family you choose. It’s still a story about passion and about my childhood memories but this one also brings in my joy in a telling a good love story. A story about characters who take pride in their talent and joy in sharing that talent with each other. The fact that the talent they share is one of my earliest memories? That was something truly special for me. My love of baking is something that is connected deeply to my past and gifting that love to a main character was an experience I didn’t fully appreciate until I was done cooking her up. It’s an ode to all of the bakers in my life and all of the stories my family and I have shared over the years while eating a fresh scone and drinking a good cup of tea.
(c) Méabh McDonnell
About Any Way You Slice It by Méabh McDonnell:
Sieve. Measure. Mix … Win
For Carrie Quinn, baking isn’t just a hobby: it’s her future.
Winning the Castlecreagh baking competition and becoming best young pastry chef in the country is the first step towards her dream. But when she and Dara Harte, handsome pastry prodigy and Carrie’s sworn nemesis, are both disqualified from the competition, it seems like her future has crumbled.
Unless the pair can find a way to bake together. Can they rise above their rivalry and complicated home lives long enough to succeed? Or are they a disaster waiting to happen, any way you slice it?
Order your copy of Any Way You Slice It online here.
And read more Meet the Authors of Children’s Books on Writing.ie here.
