Review of Cursed Bread by Sophie Mackintosh

*Cursed Bread* by Sophie Mackintosh (2023). Published by Doubleday Books.

Cursed Bread is one of those books whose covers I kept seeing everywhere for a hot minute. I’d open up my Instagram page and bam, there it was on my explore feed. I saw the Twitter girlies posting about it at one point, and then I succumbed to peer pressure.

I put in an order at my local library so I could get a physical copy in my hands for three weeks, and since there were no holds on the book (surprising considering how much I had been seeing it on social media), I managed to get it within the week.

This is a really short book, if we’re going to be honest. Nowadays the average book I’ve been checking out usually clocks in at 230 or 330 pages (it’s always in that ballpark), but Cursed Bread is only one hundred and eighty-four pages.

Some of the chapters are also pretty brief, so I found I was getting through the book pretty quickly. It only took about an hour to read the entire book, as I started it in the bath and was almost finished by the time I got out of it.

Onwards with the review!

The baker’s wife becomes infatuated with a new woman in town as a mysterious illness spreads.

The narrator and protagonist of Cursed Bread is the town’s baker’s wife, Elodie. She doesn’t really exist to stand out in the world of the novel, and her lifestyle is pretty ordinary outside of work. But something changes when she becomes obsessed with a new arrival to town: an ambassador has arrived with his wife, Violet. It’s Violet who Elodie becomes obsessed with throughout the course of the novel, which makes her blind to what’s happening on the streets of the town and the role she may play in it.

Something to note about this novel, and it is mentioned after the closing paragraphs, is that it was based on an actual event that happened in France in the 1951.

An entire town saw itself the victim of mass poisoning, and it is suspected that the cause of such an event was the local baker’s bread. Something was in the bread, and while many people did not die in real life, it’s this event that Cursed Bread models itself after.

The book grounds itself in Elodie’s desire for Violet and the need to want to become one with her. She’s recalling the events at hand in the novel, so the actual speaking and dictation is happening after the fact. She’s been unsatisfied with her life and marriage because all she does is the mundane life of a village woman in the fifties, and her husband has no interest in her and only lives for his bread and baking.

It’s this lack of intimacy that makes Elodie imagine erotic fantasies being involved with someone like Violet, even as her feelings towards the other woman oscillate between this revered nature and feeling a petty jealousy for what she has in life.

But the more Elodie becomes consumed by her feelings, the more she loses her grip on reality. There are strange things happening in this town, and because she is ignoring the signs, it creeps up on her slowly but surely.

The climax of the novel is when she finds her husband afflicted by something in the bread, but when Elodie finds him struggling with the impacts of whatever is happening, she basically kills him and feeds him more of the bread. In other houses, people are seeing things on the walls, and a man even slits his own throat in front of his wife because of what was in that bread.

Overall Thoughts

So this is the kind of book that you need to really focus on the narrative and words in front of you because if you’re not paying attention, you’re going to get lost in the prose. I think the way the book is written fits the narrator’s state of mind after the events that have happened, because she’s not quite sane anymore.

There’s a lot of details packed into what’s on the page and it’s told in a nonlinear format, so one may need multiple reads in order to get the full nuance of what’s actually happening here.

I’m a pretty good reader and I even found myself lost at certain points and needed to reread passages because I had no idea what was happening in this particular moment. But besides that, this was an interesting read in showing mass hysteria, envy, and the consequences of one’s actions. I didn’t love the book, but I thought it was compelling at times.

Follow me below on Instagram and Goodreads for more content.