It took me awhile to get into this one but then I really enjoyed it! Very different writing style. Lots of layers and character development. Surprising. Worth reading.

Since I see this book on the to-read list of a few of my friends here, I will recommend skipping it. I found it disappointing and hard to follow the whole second plot line on the "babes in the woods" and his father in Stanley Park. In reading other reviews, it seems this reaction is common.

I really struggled to get into thjs novel. I found the story arc strangely stunted and difficult to engage with over a long period of time. It took me a week to stick it through in the end and it was the kitchen scenes more than Stanley Park which the book is named for that I enjoyed.

One of the finest novels in the English language, but unputdownable.

This book was fine but I feel like it took too long to get going and never quite got to the point it was trying to make, but it was saved from being too disappointing by a decent ending.

I can only recommend this book to people who are true foodies. They would appreciate all the detail and research that has been done to create an impressive rendering of a high end restaurant kitchen and what it takes to make it in that industry.

Unfortunately, I was after a bit of a different experience. I had heard that Timothy Taylor was a prize-winner when it came to short stories and I had even read one excellent piece of his in the Malahat Review. So my expectations were high. It didn't bother me that our main character was a chef -- a character has to be something, but I expected the story to launch from there and it didn't. The kitchen struggles were the story. The types of knives and the recipes and the money troubles were pretty much all Taylor had to offer.

He did have a subplot involving the main characters anthropologist father who studies the homeless living in Stanley Park. There was even a murder mystery that we had to chew on, but it hardly amounted to much. What I got was a chef who had feelings, wasn't after getting rich, wanted to reconnect with his dad, and who had a passion for eating locally grown meat, veggies, etc. Not the Pinteresque, Orwellian masterpiece I had hoped for.

Honestly I could not finish the bloody thing-

The first time I tried to read this book , could not get into it. As it was sitting in my library not read decided I would give it another try.Very interesting story but not a quick read. Lots of discussion around food if the reader is a 'foodie'. I found the last half of the book more interesting because I had figured out the author's style of writing along with the main story the author was telling ..... three tracts or stories woven together which becomes clear by the end. I can understand why it was nominated as a Giller Prize Finalist and glad that I went back and read it.

Chef and struggling restaurant owner Jeremy Papier has a dream. He wants his restaurant to bring the hyper-industrialized, homogenized, world back to its roots: food, specifically, that which is grown locally.

And so he gets his dream when, through struggling to find his own family's roots, he begins to cook the wildlife of Vancouver's Stanley Park: the squirrels, starlings, ducks, geese, raccoons. His first park repast was with his father. They dined on the duck that his father had caught. Eventually Jeremy began to feed a collective of the homeless living in the park. His father, 'The Professor,' is a social anthropologist who, in doing this project, his last, has gone back to finish where he began his career. He is exploring his own and the city's roots by choosing to live amongst the homeless who reside beneath the forest's canopy, hidden from the city's eyes that are too busy to see them. He is exploring what it is that are the ties, the roots, that bind people to homelessness. During the course of the book, this sub-theme comments that, in some ways, these people are more closely connected to their environment, more alive if you will, than the grasping many who have big houses, but spend most of their time feeling alienated and disconnected from their lives.

But the protagonist is Jeremy, and his dream falls apart when his self-destructive impulse purchase of a $3000 knife cuts the final threads of his credit card kiting. With creditors hounding him, he turns to the international coffee czar to save him and his dream. But a czar doesn't live the dreams of others, and in an elegance only a wealthy thug can envisage, he steals Jeremy's dream and twists it into an ungrounded international smorgasbord.

What would any creative and daring Chef do to see his dream survive beneath the tyranny of the condescension of wealth?

And so Taylor writes a complex and elegant fugue that explores the roots of family and food. This is an engaging delightful and complex read. I highly recommend it.

I have blogged this, with an extended citation and a triptych of synchronicity-petites @ egajdbooks.

One of my favorite books of all time. It captures the local food culture of Vancouver and changed the way I think about cusine, eating and the art of cooking.

Cute, and loaded with food descriptions.

I'm not sure what I expected of Stanley Park, but I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed this book! Set in the East Side of Vancouver, a nearly-30, French-trained chef makes a go of his own small foodie-type restaurant with his partner in crime Jules while infrequently visiting his professorial father at his camp in Stanley Park, where the father is observing the homeless population there.

Good throughout, no lingering points, and a great eye for description, I have to say that Timothy Taylor exceeded my expectations. 3.5/5 + .5 for surprising me with it's excellence in plot and style.