Mrs. Quinn’s Rise to Fame is a warmhearted coming-of-old-age story of secrets, following your dream, and baking.

Mrs. Quinn’s Rise to Fame by Olivia Ford

Genre/Categories/Setting: Fiction, Women’s Fiction, Marriage, Secrets, Baking, England

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My Summary of Mrs. Quinn’s Rise to Fame:

Jenny is seventy-seven years old, happily married for sixty years, and loves to bake. One day, she impulsively and secretly fills out an application to be a contestant on a popular, prime-time British baking show. As she bakes and considers old family recipes, we get her backstory. Not only is she keeping the baking show a secret from her husband, she’s also hiding another big secret from her past.

My Thoughts:

Do you have a beloved family recipe that has been passed down?

Secrets

Jenny’s secrets drive the plot of this character-driven story. If there’s a trope as frustrating as “miscommunication,” it’s secret-keeping. Jenny has been keeping a significant secret from her husband for sixty years. While I can understand keeping this 60-year-old secret initially (societal pressures), I don’t understand the need to maintain the secrecy from her beloved husband for decades. Times change, people heal, and one mistake doesn’t define a life.

Jenny carries this secret-keeping tendency into the later years of her marriage as she hides her dreams (and actual application) of entering the British baking show from her husband. Bernard’s upstanding character and generous/kind spirit gives me no reason to believe that secret keeping was necessary, and I feel sorry for him as the story progresses. As Jenny finds out, modern technology makes secrets more difficult to protect.

Bernard

My favorite character in the story is Bernard. He’s a lovely, thoughtful, supportive, kind, and forgiving husband. An upstanding person. He doesn’t deserve to be kept in the dark.

Uplit

If you can overlook Jenny’s secret keeping, this is an uplifting story overall. We have a sad (in the past) reflection (no spoilers) that prompts Jenny to keep her first secret from Bernard. While emotional, it’s not overly dramatic as it was fairly common at the time. (if you want to know more, I’m happy to discuss it in comments) The uplifting elements involve friendships and Jenny’s pursuit of a personal dream. The baking competition is a part of the “uplit” content and is not cut-throat. In the end there’s a strong sense of hope and a lovely HEA.

Favorite Quotes

“It’s sometimes easy to feel left behind at my age, as if the world has a future and you have no place in it . . . but I hope to discover that there is meaning and adventure still to be found.”

“Jenny has shown that our dreams have a place at every stage of our journey . . . that they can be achieved because of our age, and not in spite of it.”

“Over the years you will both inevitably change but you will always have one thing in common, and that is that you’re both only human, so try to be kind.”

Content Consideration: toxic relationship and unplanned pregnancy

Recommending Mrs. Quinn’s Rise to Fame

If you love baking (a couple of recipes included), family recipes, and a gently-told, uplifting story, you will appreciate Mrs. Quinn’s Rise to Fame. (The secrets trope didn’t affect my overall rating and falls in the category of personal preference). It’s emotional in a couple of places (flashbacks) but not overly dramatic. No profanity.

Related: You might enjoy The Kitchen Front, another British baking show competition.

My Rating:  4 Stars

Meet the Author of Mrs. Quinn’s Rise to Fame, Olivia Ford

Olivia Ford has spent the last ten years in entertainment TV, most recently as a story producer. Olivia is a graduate of the Faber Academy where she wrote the beginnings of Mrs Quinn’s Rise to Fame, which was long listed for the 2021 Women’s Prize Trust’s Discoveries Prize. Raised in Lincolnshire, Olivia now lives in London.

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QOTD:

Do you love “uplit” fiction and baking?

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