Barbara L.B. Storey

This is the most depressing, boring, and shapeless memoir I have ever read. I had to force myself to finish it. In my opinion, this is no more than a too-long progression of strung-together vignettes about how miserable Slater's childhood was, with copious mentions of food and brands that no one outside England would recognise (I'm Canadian, so I recognised more than some would). He seems to have judged his parents almost completely on how well they cooked certain dishes, and found them completely incompetent on most counts, yet he ends almost every one of these stories with a declaration that he loved the food anyway. The only person whose cooking he actually compliments is his hated step-mother. And it seems that almost every adult male he met as a child molested him in some way - yet he seems to have never told anyone about this, before writing this book.

Since the book ends when he is a young man barely into his twenties, getting his first job in London, I wonder what he thought the point of the book was. "Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger" is a story that's not very well told, and I was bored and annoyed and was surprised I actually managed to finish it. I never get rid of books, but I think I might be able to part with this one.