This book is another one with the focus on a collection of quirky characters, set in fantastic situations grounded in a plausible base. Like his preceding book Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore it is set in a recognizable San Francisco among tech companies, this time focussing on the startup scene rather than one of the megacompanies, but crossing this with the foodie obsession which is a real thing here to try to come up with a story that relies on both. There are many kinds of tech startups, but this one is in the robotics space so he brings in just enough information about the concerns that engineers working with sensors and manipulators have, enough to make it seem realistic. The food angle comes from two sources, the superfocused ethnic cuisine which pops up here and there in certain neighborhoods, and the farmers' markets featuring all kinds of artisanal edibles. The main character finds herself traveling from the first world among software engineers, managers, and entrepreneurs out of central casting towards the second world on account of a literal gut-level pain that she find needs to be addressed. In the foodie ecosystem, moreover, there are good elements acting in good faith to bring good ingredients and traditional techniques to bear on their edibles in a straightforward fashion, and there are more sketchy elements who obsess about one or another feature of their food and blow it up into their all. These latter types might be just harmless maniacs or they can grow out of proportion, so, it turns out, can sourdough starter.

I enjoyed the audiobook, although I feel as a native I do have to make one observation about the remarkable Thérèse Plummer's pronunciation of "Clement Street" which is not the same as the way San Franciscans say it. I was able to rationalize this away by concentrating on the fact that the first-person narrator is a transplant from Michigan and didn't grow up hearing it that way. Cabrillo Street I'm less sure of. One of the reasons I snatched up this Audible book is because of how much I liked her work on the audiobook of The Collected Stories by Lydia Davis.