The Elegance of the Hedgehog is Muriel’s second book after Gourmet Rhapsody, and is actually the bread on a Gourmet Rhapsody sandwich. The Elegance of the Hedgehog is set in the same building as Gourmet Rhapsody and begins shortly before the death bed of Pierre Arthens, and quickly passes by his death with a simple thought from a 12 year old girl in another apartment:
Pierre Arthens for sure was truly nasty. They say he was the pope of food critics and a worldwide chapion of French cuisine. Well, that doesn’t surprise me. If you want my opinion, French cuisine is pitiful. So much genius and wherewithal and so many resources for such a heavy end result … And so many sauces and stuffings and pastries, enough to make you burst! It’s in such bad taste … And when it isn’t heavy, it’s as fussy as can be: you’re dying of hunger and before you are three stylized radishes and two scallops in a seaweed gelee served on pseudo-Zen plates by waiters who look as joyful as undertakers.
As a classically trained chef myself, i couldn’t agree more.
Once Pierre is dead, the story quickly moves on as Pierre’s apartment is soon taken over by a new, wealthy occupant.
So while Gourmet Rhapsody is certainly a good starter, you don’t need to have read it beforehand to enjoy the main course of The Elegance of the Hedgehog, you could actually read it when the Pierre’s death is spoken about in The Elegance of the Hedgehog, or even afterwards, as a desert, if you so wish.
But whether you read Gourmet Rhapsody or not, i highly suggest you read The Elegance of the Hedgehog. At it’s heart is Muriel having some fun with the juxtaposition of the poor concierge on the ground floor with the wealthy inhabitants of the apartments above; peeling back the curtains to see what’s really going on behind these closed doors, throwing in some great little rants, ideas, and wonderful, philosophical, food-for-thought concerning the disparity of rich and poor in society; and how each tend to live in completely separate universes, oblivious to each other, hopefully never having to meet on the stairs.
As i’ve previously mentioned in Night Train to Lisbon, i do enjoy philosophers who write novels, and if i had real books i’d happily put Muriel on the shelf next to Pascal.
Super good, and next up from Muriel will be The Life of Elves which i’ll be sure to get around to reading in the not too distant future.
Still the same feeling that i was getting with 
I’ve been looking forward to reading this for quite some time now but just haven’t gotten around to it until now. And i’m glad i finally did.
As usual i check the loc points when i open a book on my Kindle. This one said 800, so was obviously a short, but i was rather disappointed when it suddenly ended after 242 loc points and i find the rest is just a marketing exercise for a future book in the series. It’s a very short, short masquerading as a normal short.
All mostly very enjoyable. My only moan is that some passages are a bit tedious: it’s like you just really want the pace to keep going but instead it slows right down to tell you what someone is thinking, or some long winded conversation, right in the middle of a load of fast moving chaos that you want to be enjoying in a fast pace way. I admit that i only felt like that a few times, so it’s not like the book is like that all the way through, and that’s probably why those few passages stand out so much as the rest of it is really on a good pace throughout.
I soooo enjoyed 
I couldn’t finish it. Bless me, i tried to, i really did, but i really couldn’t take any more of this tedious mediocrity.
I was hoping for some really good old fashioned Steampunk, but it’s certainly not the usual kind of Steampunk that one is used to. It’s alright though, i read it to the end and don’t feel disappointed.
What a thoroughly good ending to a thoroughly good trilogy. It’s been well paced enjoyment all the way through, written/edited really well, great characters and a really great location.
The first book in the follow up trilogy to Heartstrikers. It does say at the beginning of this book that you don’t need to have read Heartstrikers to enjoy this trilogy, but there’s so much in this book that is predicated on what happened in Heartstrikers and i really think you’d be missing out on a whole lot of background and enjoyment if you didn’t read Heartstrikers first.