Lois Clary is a programmer at a Silicon Valley company that is creating giant robotic arms to do the work of humans (think stirring and putting things together) when she receives the gift of a sourdough starter from a pair of brothers who only know her as the lady who always orders spicy soup from them. Lois knows nothing about baking, but takes the gift and decides to give it a whirl, quickly learning that this sourdough starter is not normal. She's soon swallowed up into a world of strange food, an even stranger farmers market, and research into the brothers' enigmatic ethnicity.
I read this book when it first came out in 2017 and remembered loving it. I was pleasantly surprised that this is still the case today. It's clever and weird and, oddly, not the only book in my collection featuring a sentient sourdough starter. While many strange things in this book are truly fictitious (though wouldn't Lembas be cool to have in real life? For hiking purposes alone...), the Lois Club is absolutely real, which is completely delightful. A fantastic book about food, technology, and what makes us really alive.
By the way, the edition of the book I have includes a bonus story, "The Suitcase Clone," which is tangentially related to Sourdough. It was equally captivating, and I'd love it if Sloan expanded it into his next book.
Last bit: see those bright yellow spots on the cover? Yeah, they glow in the dark.
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