This book was read at Kalimna, Yeranda cottages, near Dungog in early January 2025.
We live in an age where endless self-empowerment and improvement have become dogma, the endless mantras of a world where you don’t stand still, you don’t stop and you don’t simply make do.
It’s an endless round of change and self-advantaging transformation that isn’t supposed to stop until you are in your coffin heading six feet, or whatever the metric equivalent is, underground.
But somewhere along the line, it’s been decreed that older people, and that lines is rubbery at best, should just seal themselves in formic acid, become museum pieces of their younger, more dynamic selves and leave the younger set to renew, revamp and redo.
But what if you don’t want to simply sit back in a comfy chair and wait for mortality to do its rather fatalistic thing? What if you’re the titular protagonist of Mrs Quinn’s Rise to Fame by Olivia Ford and you decide one day that you are done carpe diem-ing life?
Why then, you apply, in complete secrecy for your country’s favourite competitive primetime baking show and you find yourself taking your gift for luscious pastries and divine cakes to the nation, the new darling of a nation who suddenly comes to realise that maybe getting older doesn’t mean you let go of your dreams and perhaps there’s life yet left to live.
And whom better to be the poster person for old age empowerment that 77-year-old Mrs Quinn who suddenly finds herself far from her small, cosy kitchen in rural England and under the lights and in front of the cameras of Britain Bakes where her love of baking becomes shared with an eager nation of viewers who fall in love with her heartfelt love of making baked goods.
She looked from Maurice to Bernard as he focused on the road, the creases at the corner of his eyes and around his mouth exposing him as a kind man, a man who laughed. She admired his unusually thick eyelashes which she has covered for half a century and thought of the hours she had spent sitting beside him as he drove. Sometimes they chatted and other times they enjoyed the silence of each other’s company. She couldn’t imagine a life without him in it.
But in amongst all the warmth and loveliness of this sudden change in life trajectory, Mrs Quinn ins grappling with a fairly sizeable challenge.
A secret she has held close to her heart for sixty years, which absolutely no one can know about including her darling, kind and beautifully supportive husband Bernard, is in danger of surfacing as the devoted viewers of Britain Bakes and a media cohort eager to give them everything they want to know about the new objects of their affection, do their fangirl thing.
Her holding of this secret is an anomaly in a marriage marked by honesty and sharing, with their decision made for mutually supportive honesty following on from the fact that they only have each other after a decision not to have children many, many years before. (The couple are closing in on their sixtieth wedding anniversary so their childbearing years are way behind them.)
The only other time that Jennifer Quinn has held anything back from Bernard was in applying for Britain Bakes, a decision driven by the idea that someone of her age and literally baked-in domesticity shouldn’t be thinking of doing anything more than baking nice, bouncy sponges.
Secret keeping doesn’t come easily to her but in the first instance in particular, she believed it was for the best, lest real hurt come to those she loves by a revelation that would undercut the relevancy of decisions made years earlier and the live they have fashioned in its wake.
(courtesy Curtis Brown Creative)
The joy of Mrs Quinn’s Rise to Fame, the name coming from the decision of her 14-year-old great-nephew to craft her a memorable online presence, is that it takes a fairly major issue, one that can’t be disclosed lest spoilers wreck the read, and weaves it with real sensitivity and thoughtfulness into a story that feels like a warm, big hug.
Jennifer Quinn is deep loved (and she loves right back with baked goods and a boundless heart) by Bernard, who is delightful, by her niece Rose, and her Rose’s husband Jeremy, and their kids, Max and sweet eight-year-old Poppy who loves talking to her great uncle Bernard because he never talks down to her and baking with her endlessly kind, great aunt Jenny.
The world of Mrs Quinn’s Rise to Fame is one of love, community and family and Ford brings to its heart-swelling life with a warmth and richness that will salve any aches and pains your life-battered soul may have.
But this brilliantly comforting novel doesn’t stop there.
It adds some real emotional heft to its storytelling by taking us back in every so often chapters to Jenny’s life before Bernard and before her late-in-life decision to reinvent herself, a time when a buoyant sixteen-yer-old is at secretarial college ready to forget a career and hopefully find a man to be with for the rest of her life.
There’s so much ambition, so much hope and while there is sadness too, Jenny is confident she will rise above it and her life will go somewhere truly wonderful.
‘Happiness is,’ she [Mrs. Quinn] said as she savoured the moment, one of thousands of little moments which together formed a lifetime.
‘You’re very clever,’ he said, winding down the window to brush the sugar from his hands. ‘ But then again, I’ve always known that.’
That it does is beyond question with her life with Bernard and her wondrously lovely family everything she could have asked for and more.
But the past doesn’t seem to want to stay in the past, and while she tries to busy herself with practising her baking for the show and adapting to a world of timed challenges and competitions who become, for the most part, friends, there is an ache of life undone, of hurts still open that sooner or later Jenny will have to reckon with.
Quite how that happens must be left to the reading of Mrs Quinn’s Rise to Fame which is a heart-stirring delight to read because its characters, while bathed in fairytale possibility and joyfulness, feel real and true to the truth of what it means to be human, and that while we get many things right, we also get a great deal wrong.
Most of us like Jenny emerge out of the other side of such errant decisions reasonably intact but pain lingers and regrets will not be quieted, and while Mrs Quinn’s Rise to Fame is about Jenny finding new purpose and meaning far later in life than she expected, it’s also about we need to make peace with our past two truly enjoy it.
Mrs Quinn’s Rise to Fame is one of those novels that does feel like all the warmth and love of the world poured into a bountifully uplifting story, and it will do your heart a power of good, but it’s also emotionally honest and truthful too, and it’s this powerful combination of real, lived human experience and the joy that comes from connection and selfless love that makes it a novel you must not just read but take to your heart, not just while it’s being read but well beyond.