Review: Ms. Mebel Goes Back to the Chopping Block by Jesse Q. Sutanto

 

Ms. Mebel Goes Back to the Chopping Block by Jesse Q. Sutanto

Publication Date: April 28th 2026 by Berkley

Pages: 304

Source: Publisher 

Rating: ★★★★

Links: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | Libro.fm | Audible | Goodreads

My Thoughts:

Mebel’s a sixty-three-year-old who excels at being a “trophy wife”. She maintains her body and looks and has built her life around what her husband, Henk, wants. However, her life is turned upside down when he asks for a divorce. He’s taken up with their twenty-four-year-old chef, Wendy. Mebel isn’t going to take this lying down, though, and decides to go to school to become a chef to win her husband back.

 

Right away, things don’t go as expected and instead of attending a glitzy school in Paris, she’s mistakenly enrolled herself at the campus England, in the very unglamorous town of Cowley. The classes are more work than she thought, and all the students are younger than her son. But soon Mebel is enjoying the feeling of accomplishment she has mastering the skills. She’s even making friends and even though they’re much younger, she feels truly seen for who she is as an individual apart from her husband.

 

Ms. Mebel was a lot of fun with Ms. Sutanto’s signature humor!  Mebel was a character with her brutal honesty and Chinese grandmother ways, but this was also a touching journey. It was satisfying to see Mebel start over and find joy!

4 Stars

Book Description:

A nearly divorced housewife enrolls in culinary school to win back her husband, only to start questioning the strange antics of her classmates in this new novel from the USA Today bestselling author of Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers.

Retirement should mean long-awaited trips to the sapphire waters of Santorini or careening down a sand dune in Dubai. For sixty-three-year-old Mebel, retirement means her husband of more than forty years announcing that he's leaving her for their private chef. Mebel isn’t sure who's the bigger loss.

Not to worry, Mebel has the perfect plan: she’s going to win back her husband. No one knows what he needs better than her—after all, she's been anticipating his needs their whole marriage. And if he wants a wife who can cook (why else would he leave her for a chef?), she will simply go to cooking school. Luckily, class at the renowned Saint Honoré School of Culinary Arts in France starts in just four days!

However, Mebel quickly realizes that her culinary school is not in illustrious Paris but rather in England—and some small village outside of Oxford no less. Despite the less-than-warm welcome from her much younger classmates, Mebel manages to befriend Gemma, the breakout star of the program, who offers to help Mebel on their first day. When Gemma stops showing up to class, Mebel knows she must figure out what—or who—caused her friend’s sudden disappearance. After all, Mebel may not know the first thing about how to cut a potato, but she certainly knows how to identify a fraud, and there’s definitely something fishy going on.