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Ms. Mebel Goes Back to the Chopping Block
Jesse Q Sutanto
Publication Date: April 28th, 2026
Berkley Publishing Group
304 Pages
Amazon | Goodreads | Bookshop.org
Genre: General Fiction | Women’s Fiction
I’ve never read anything by this author before, and this was an okay book for a first-time reader. It’s about the 63-year-old titular character, Mebel. Mebel lives in Jakarta and is very uptight. After forty years of marriage, her husband, Henk, leaves her. Mebel is shocked by this and decides cooking lessons are the way to win him back. She joins a cooking school in Paris—or so she thinks—but makes a big mistake and accidentally enrolls in the smaller sister school located just outside Oxford in England, not France.
I enjoyed watching Mebel grow from trying to save her marriage to an ungrateful cad to learning a lot about herself; I just wish there was more of it. She has to deal with a lot of younger people in cooking class and ends up becoming friends with one named Gemma. Like the author’s other books, this one turns into a mystery when Gemma disappears. Mebel may not be very good in the kitchen, but she is good at reading people.
This was what I would call a “romp” (yes, I am that old!), and because I am near Mebel’s age, I was cheering her on. The comedy of errors was a bit heavy-handed, but I found the book charming in its own way. Watching a 63-year-old trophy wife try and get through the rural English countryside and school was something to behold. I also enjoyed the “found family” aspect as well.
I was a bit put off by what the book was trying to be—too much, in my opinion. It started off as a high drama about Mebel’s marriage coming to an end, quickly turned into a comedy, and then changed again into a mystery. While I appreciated the lightheartedness, at times it became a bit too much and made it hard to clearly understand Mebel’s growth as a character. I also wish we got more of the cooking school; that would have been so much fun and interesting. The whole marriage ending and the education aspects felt rushed. This would make a good beach read if you like quirky stories and can overlook the repetitiveness.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.
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