The Boston Globe -- "Moving your family to France in search of marital repair, personal growth, and a whole lot of wonderful meals sounds like — well, it sounds a lot like a certain recent publishing phenomenon. “How to Eat a Small Country’’ shares a few key traits with Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love,’’ in particular an infectiously likeable narrator and mouthwatering descriptions of European food. But Finley’s memoir is less precious, more honest, and ultimately more rewarding. For one thing, it starts with a fairly graphic description of the first step in preparing lapin à la moutarde: killing a rabbit. Cooking, real cooking, it turns out, is a test that reveals a lot more than eating does. MORE>>

Starred Review. "Third-season winner of The Next Food Network Star heads to France to rebuild her life and marriage."

"After emerging as the victor, Finley found herself quickly disenchanted by her resulting 15 minutes of fame. The author walked away from it all, regarded by many as a highly controversial move, because her marriage was falling apart and nothing felt "real" anymore. She retreated back to San Diego and her estranged husband and their two small children. But it wasn't long before the author suggested a move to her husband's native France in an attempt to repair her marriage and preserve her family-and her sanity. MORE>>

BOOKLIST
"When Amy Finley entered in and won the reality-television show The Next Food Network Star, her success and the subsequent filming of her own cooking show kept her so busy that, ironically, she no longer found the time to cook for her own family—and here’s where the problems began. In an attempt to salvage her marriage on the brink of its demise (her husband had begged her not to compete), Finley suggested the family move to France for nine months: the country where she fell in love with her husband and with cooking. MORE>>