Julie Powell is back... and this time she's chucked Mastering the Art of French Cooking in favor of extracting the internal organs of various animals. Don't forget, she's also cheating on her husband and obsessing about entrails. There's just no end to her versatility - in one book she's a spunky gal downtrodden by a dead-end job but nurturing her soul through food (Julie & Julia) and in the next, she's cleaving a pig head in two with a skil-saw before having gross anonymous sex in a hallway with a stranger and mourning the imminent demise of her marriage while drinking herself to sleep.

This book read like a defiant toddler's response to the image Powell herself created in her first memoir. It's the literary equivalent of a bad breakup haircut - you know you don't really want hot pink highlights, but it's going to prove that you're AWESOME and BOLD and INDEPENDENT MINDED and TOTALLY FREE TO DO WHATEVER YOU WANT. Beyond the thematic craziness, the pacing was lousy. We spend the first 7/8th of the book following New Badass Julie as she becomes an apprentice butcher worshiping at the altar of meat, then we careen around the world with her as she travels to famous places where she eats supposedly amazing boutique meats and decides what she wants to do with her life, her career, and her marriage. It's just too bad that by that point, caring about Julie has become as tough as a mouthful of badly cut non-organic factory-farmed chicken.