Book Review | The Making Of Mrs Petrakis

A catch up for one of my August RWDC challenge prompts and one of my backlog books.

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The Making Of Mrs Petrakis
Mary Karras

Cyprus in the run up to the civil war of the 1970s… the threat of it hangs in the atmosphere like a fine mist. A terrible thing, war. Against this backdrop of war and violence, the island’s inhabitants make the best they can of their lives, building friendships, falling in love, having children, watching people die, making mistakes.

Maria Petrakis, however, flees a brutal marriage on the island where she has always lived for London and a new start. She opens a bakery on Green Lanes in Harringay – the centre of the small Greek Cypriot community whose residents have settled there to escape the war and start again. Here she comes into her own as she heals and atones through the kneading of bread and the selling of shamali cakes and cinnamon pastries to her customers.

There are glimpses of the lives of her neighbours, friends and customers as they buy their bread and cakes. There’s Mrs Koutsouli, whose heart was broken when her handsome son married a xeni , an English woman with fish-eyes and yellow hair. There’s Mrs Pantelis, driven half-mad with the grief of losing her son, Nico, in the war. And there’s Mrs Vasili who claims to be related to Nana Mouskouri and grows her hair upwards so she can feel closer to God. Finally, there’s Elena, Maria Petrakis’ daughter-in-law, who has been suffering with the blackness since having a baby, and whom nobody knows quite how to help.

The Making Of Mrs Petrakis is a story about the limited choices women sometimes find themselves confronting. It’s a story about repression and mental illness and the devastation it can wreak on lives. But above all, it is a story of motherhood and love and of healing through the humble act of baking.

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I’m not sure what it was that drew me to this story originally but I always like the surprise of a book that I wouldn’t ordinarily pick up.

There is something very cosy about this book, I think the small community aspect, the bakery and Maria herself created a warm atmosphere which was easy to sink into. It was needed because it was set against the trials and tribulations of Maria, Elena, and their families and some quite harrowing topics are depicted in the story so the warmth gave some balance to help me through.

It was fascinating exploring the lives of this family, it is centred around Maria and Elena, but as well as seeing them at the different stages of their lives we are also seeing the rest of their family. We get to experience the life they came from in Cyprus and the changes they go through as they move to England and have to adapt to a new way of life.

The story jumps around quite a lot, it is told through Maria and Elena’s POV but it isn’t linear it goes back and forth to different years in their life and it can be quite hard to keep a hold of who and at what time in their life you are reading about. I did struggle with this a little but I soon got used to it and quite enjoyed the unexpected nature of where in the timeline I would be.

However, there is a point in Elena’s storyline where it jumps past something quite significant and as a reader you aren’t sure what that is. Instead of hinting at what was to come, it left me confused about what was happening, so much so that I had to read the section a few times to make sure I wasn’t misreading it. Whilst stylistically this can be an interesting way to spur a story on I don’t think it works well here, it just added more disorientation.



I did love the characters though, Maria who fights so hard for a better life for herself and her son and becomes a reliable and warm matriarch, I liked her meddling because it was always with good intentions, and her ear for gossip. Elena just wants to feel like she belongs to a loving family without the weight of so much expectation and ends up getting a little lost along the way. I love that they both gravitate to each other and even when Elena is struggling Maria feels like an anchor.

I approached this book thinking that it would be quite a light-hearted read and whilst it had some lighter moments it does not fall into that category. Even though it does deal with some heavy topics I still felt a lot of joy whilst reading, it is an engaging story and it made me appreciate the strength and resilience of women. It also had me craving all sorts of sweet treats, I was pining for a proper bakery for days.