SOURCE: A review of The Ideal Bakery, in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 27, No. 1, Winter, 1990, pp. 121–22.

In the following review, Christopherson offers a positive assessment of The Ideal Bakery, calling Hall “one of contemporary literature's gourmet chefs.”

The characters in Donald Hall's first collection of short stories, The Ideal Bakery, are mainstream, and their plights are all too recognizable: a divorced father trying to get back in touch with his bookish nine-year-old during a weekend fishing trip; a middle-aged professor trying to rekindle a relationship with an embittered former lover; a graduate student of literature whose stationery-store-proprietor husband will never be the romantic she dreams of. But that is not to say the stories are common. On the contrary, Hall shows uncommon sensitivity in treating themes like loneliness, loss, and the erosion—or demolition—of innocence by experience.

In the title story, the narrator reminisces about the breakfasts...