Summary

Pamela Kelley’s The Restaurant employs a third person narrator who speaks in the past tense. The novel follows the story of three sisters: Mandy, Emma, and Jill. Chapter 1 opens with Jill surfing the web for tasty chocolate cake recipes at her work. She is preparing to celebrate her grandmother’s birthday, known affectionately as “Grams.” Jill and her sisters have been exceptionally close to their grandmother ever since “their mother passed away almost twelve years ago, after an unexpected and short battle with pancreatic cancer. Their father had followed six months later,” and Grams always told the girls he had died of “a broken heart” (2-3). Grams is “determined and feisty at barely five feet tall and maybe ninety-five pounds,” full of life, sharp as a whip, and acts as a mother figure for the three girls (3). As she surfs the web...