The Julie/Julia Project blog was ahead of its time. It may not have had the colorful layout or design of the blogs we know and love today, but a blog should highlight what you’re going through or doing as well as be able to draw people in and that is definitely what Julie Powell did when she started her blog back in 2002. She decided to cook her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking cookbook by Julia Child in one year.

It’s nice when a blog has a following, but Julie started her blog because she needed some sort of side project that could take the stress out of her day to day job. She had no idea where the blog would take her, but she started it for her and that’s what I admire about her project.

I read this book in ebook format and it was 308 pages long. It took a little longer to get into than I thought it would. I will admit, I had seen the movie before I read the book so I don’t know if that had something to do with it. Powell goes into great detail and her sentences tend to be a little wordy.

Toward the middle of the book is when I got used to her writing style, which is very sarcastic and sometimes it is hard not to laugh out loud. She incorporates stories about her friends and husband and how they all coincide with her cooking journey.

What I really liked was how she wove stories in about Julia. They were short, just about two pages and were at the end of each chapter. They were taken from letters that Julia Child’s husband had wrote and Julie Powell used them to show how Julia was going on a journey of finding herself through cooking.

Powell compared her own life to what Julia was going through when she found cooking. She showed how both of their journeys needed to include something to take their minds off of the things in their lives that had become mundane. Cooking was what helped them both feel like they had a purpose and I like how Powell wrote about how Julia helped her find cooking.