Book Review: "How We Named the Stars" by Andrés N. Ordorica

“I thought about how, for so much of my life, I’d survived by staying quiet, making myself small enough to fly under the radar. I decided then that I no longer wanted to be quiet. I wanted to be loud and colorful and every piece of myself at any one time.”

Daniel is a scholarship student at a prestigious college in upstate New York. He is the first in his family to go to college, and the pressure to live up to the hopes and expectations of his parents and grandfather, who left Mexico before he was born. Daniel is also ready to be the person he’s always known he should be, someone confident and comfortable with his sexuality.

It’s not long before their easy friendship evolves into something sexual, but Sam isn’t quite able to give Daniel all he wants from a relationship. At the end of freshman year they go their separate ways, and Daniel is without Sam. And when an unspeakable tragedy occurs, Daniel must figure out how to cope. So he spends the summer in Mexico with his grandfather, learning more about his late uncle Daniel, for whom he was named and who, it seems, was quite similar to him.

This was gorgeous, emotional, and so moving. It’s incredible that this is a debut novel. I honestly hadn't heard of this book until shortly before I picked it up, and I'm so thankful for that! I fell in love with everything it made me think and feel.

Book Review: "Cobblestones, Conversations, and Corks" by Giovanni Ruscitti

This was a moving memoir about discovering one’s heritage.⁣

Did your parents or grandparents ever tell you stories about your family’s history? Giovanni Ruscitti used to hear stories of his parents and grandparents’ life during World War II in Cansano, Italy. Cansano was invaded by the Nazis and the town’s residents had two choices: stay and get killed, or flee.

Following the war, the town was destroyed. Ruscitti’s parents and grandparents immigrated to a small town in Colorado in the 1950s and 1960s. But in 2013, he traveled to Cansano for the first time with his parents, along with his wife and a few of his children. His eyes were opened as the stories of his heritage came to life in front of them.

This was a tremendously moving and beautiful account. I’ll admit that as a third-generation American I lack the connection to my heritage that Ruscitti has, so that enhanced my enjoyment of this story.

Thanks so much to Get Red PR Books for inviting me on the tour and providing a complimentary copy of the book!! Grateful to Giovanni Ruscitti for sharing his and his family’s story.

Book Review: "Seven Letters" by J.P. Monninger

One of those books you devour but you don’t want it to end.

"There’s no cure for love but to love more."

Kate, on sabbatical from her teaching position at Dartmouth, travels to Ireland to do research for her doctoral dissertation about the Blasket Islands, a remote part of the country that the government migrated everyone away from years ago.

Shortly after arriving she meets Ozzie, the immensely handsome, part Irish-part American grandson of a woman she met on her journey. Ozzie is intense, mercurial, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. He has fled to Ireland in the hopes he can put the memories of the war behind him.

Kate and Ozzie fall intensely in love. She knows she’s only in Ireland for a short while and knows she needs to concentrate on her research. But her love overwhelms her, and the two try to build a life on one of the islands away from everyone else. It is idyllic at times, at times challenging, and when Ozzie is unable to escape the pain of his memories, it tears at the fibers of their relationship.

When Ozzie’s impulsive nature puts both of them at risk, Kate returns to America and tries to put the memories behind her. And while they creep back from time to time, she is doing somewhat well—until she gets word that Ozzie is lost at sea, presumed dead, and she feels the need to travel to Europe to find out what happened to him. She must decide whether she’s ready to move on fully or whether she needs to be tethered to his memory for her own sake.

I’m a total sap, and this book was utterly up my alley. I thought it was beautifully written—having the gorgeousness of Ireland as a backdrop doesn’t hurt—and it captured me fully. The instant-love plot thread may seem a little overly dramatic and/or unrealistic for some but you can totally see two people be utterly consumed by the fire of their love without thinking.

I can’t get this one out of my head. I've never read anything J.P. Monninger has written before, but I'll definitely do so again.

Book Review: "Don't Date Rosa Santos" by Nina Moreno"

"We try with all we have. We fight hands we can't see. We stomp against the earth and whisper all the right prayers, but sometimes it isn't meant to be. You believe life will always be as it is, and you make plans, but the next thing you know, you're climbing into a sinking boat in the dead of night because the land you love is no longer safe. The sun sets, he doesn't swim above the water again, and time runs out."

Rosa Santos has been raised to believe that the women in her family are cursed by the sea, especially when it comes to love, and the men who get involved with them are doomed. When her grandparents migrated from Cuba when her mother was just an infant, storms hit their boat, and only Rosa's grandmother and mother survived. Eighteen years later, the young man her mother loved (and Rosa's father) left on his boat for a routine day of work and never returned.

Since then Rosa has been afraid of even going near the water—and has steered clear of relationships. She lives with her grandmother, Mimi, in a small Florida town where everyone knows everyone's business. Mimi works as a curandera, the person everyone turns to for help with illness, crises, and everything in between. Rosa's mother drifts in and out of town, unable to stay for too long in the place where her heart was broken, and causing friction with Mimi whenever she returns.

What Rosa wants more than anything is answers. She wants to know more about what Cuba was like for her grandmother, why she'll never speak of that time or of the family left behind. She wants to understand why her mother can't stay in one place, why she can't be the mother she's always needed. And more than anything, she wants to understand the whole idea of the Santos "curse," especially when she meets Alex Aquino, the brooding sailor with tattoos of the ocean and a passion for baking.

How do you get a fresh start when everyone around you knows everything about you, and is watching your every move? Can we really overcome the challenges of our past, and outrun the "curses"? Is love worth risking everything for, especially the potential that you could "doom" someone else?

Don't Date Rosa Santos is an utterly charming, sweet book about family, love, grief, and heritage, and is, in many ways, a love letter both to Cuba and to small-town America. The characters are fun and complex, and even if there aren't too many surprises to be had in the book, I got hooked pretty quickly and read the entire book in one day.

Nina Moreno has created a magical place, and her characters are quirky and memorable. It does feel a little like Stars Hollow from Gilmore Girls, and the relationships between mothers and daughters are special. (Plus, Alex sounded hot.) This was a fun read without a tremendous amount of angst, which was a nice change of pace for me!

NetGalley and Disney-Hyperion provided me an advance copy of this book in exchange for an unbiased review. Thanks for making it available!

Book Review: "Sadness is a White Bird" by Moriel Rothman-Zecher

Oh, wow, this book was so gorgeous and moving and amazing! (Sorry I'm not more enthusiastic about it.)

Jonathan has just turned 19 and is serving in the Israeli army, a responsibility he has taken very seriously. Yet when Sadness is a White Bird begins, Jonathan is in a military prison, telling his story as a letter of sorts to one of his best friends. But how did someone so eager to serve his country wind up in prison, doubting whether military action against the Arabs is the right thing to do?

Although he was born in Israel, Jonathan and his family lived in Pennsylvania for a number of years before he persuaded them to return to their homeland so he could serve in the army, as required of all Israeli citizens. Jonathan's grandfather, who was from the Greek city of Salonica (also known as Thessaloniki), saw his entire community wiped out by the Holocaust, and through his sorrow, played a role in the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948, so Jonathan sees military service as a family inheritance.

When he meets brother and sister Laith and Nimreen, twin children of one of his mother's Palestinian friends, the three become immediately inseparable. Through their weekly adventures, they talk, share poems (and joints), and Jonathan begins to see what life in Israel is like for Arabs. While his first reaction is to defend his country's efforts to protect itself from militant Arabs, Nimreen and Laith try to explain Palestinians' allegiance to the same country, yet view their treatment by Israelis as persecution not protection. It's not long before Jonathan wonders if he really believes in the country he will be defending, whether it is possible to love your country yet question its motives at the same time.

The story weaves back and forth between Jonathan's time with Nimreen and Laith and the growing love he has for both of him, and his time in the military, leading up to the actions which land him in prison. Nimreen and Laith don't understand why Jonathan is still so adamant about serving in the military when he has begun to see that blind allegiance is not the only path, and it strains their relationship. Jonathan is torn between pride in his country and the comradeship he finds in the army, and knowing one day he may come in direct conflict with people dear to Laith and Nimreen.

This is an absolutely beautiful and poignant book, in part a coming-of-age novel, in part a story of self-discovery, as well as a story about how our idealism and naivete change as we grow older. This is a story about longing and belonging, about how sometimes there is a gap between what is expected and what is right. Moriel Rothman-Zecher does such a wonderful job taking you along Jonathan's path of self-discovery, feeling the things he feels, and he keeps you in suspense as to why he is in prison, and whether the letter he is writing will ever reach its intended audience.

I absolutely loved this book and found it very surprising at times. The characters are so memorable, and Rothman-Zecher's storytelling is so lyrical and beautiful. It will be some time before I get this one out of my head, not that I want to.

NetGalley and Atria Books provided me an advance copy of the book in exchange for an unbiased review. Thanks for making this available!

Book Review: "Give a Girl a Knife" by Amy Thielen

About 14-15 years ago (how can that be?) I went to culinary school, and worked as a personal chef for about 18 months until the economy started tanking. At that time, I always had this dream of opening a little restaurant, nothing super fancy. Of course, once I worked at a restaurant for a brief period, that dream died quickly—I thrive on pressure and chaos, but the frenetic pace of cooking in a restaurant, not to mention the pressure of having to always get everything right, would have driven me insane.

That journey in self-discovery is reinforced whenever I read a chef's memoir. Just hearing about the frenetic nature of readying plates in a high-end restaurant is enough to send me reaching for a Xanax. (Check out Michael Gibney's excellent Sous Chef: 24 Hours on the Line for a great example of this.)

"Cooking wasn't just a job; it was a life—what looked to all outsiders, including my own boyfriend, like a pretty terrible life. It was, as Aaron feared, a real affliction. And possibly, a dysfunctional relationship."

While Amy Thielen's terrific new book, Give a Girl a Knife, dips into this territory, as it chronicled her tenure cooking for some of the finest chefs—David Bouley, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Daniel Boulud, and Shea Gallante—in some of New York's most famous restaurants, it didn't dwell on this exclusively. The more time Thielen spent working on fabled, complex dishes, with ingredients and techniques not often seen in everyday kitchens, the more she realized that behind every fancy plate are the backbones of her Midwestern culinary heritage—potatoes, onion, bacon, and butter—lots of butter.

Thielen grew up in Northern Minnesota, in a town known as the home of the nation's largest French fry factory. Her mother, like generations of women before her, reveled in cooking homey, delicious, yet seemingly uncomplicated dishes reflective of Midwestern culture and the German, Austrian, and French heritage of their ancestors. Dishes like pork roast, spaetzle, fermented sour pickles, poppy seed coffee cake, and the infamous hotdishes, laden with bacon and (quite often) cheese, were part of almost every meal for Thielen and her family, yet when she decided to go to culinary school and pursue a career as a chef in New York City, she couldn't get far enough away from those elements, until she realized how truly interrelated everything was.

Give a Girl a Knife juxtaposes Thielen's culinary career with a chronicle of her growing up surrounded by food and the magnificent women who brought the food to delectable life. It also dealt with her struggles as she and her boyfriend (and eventual husband) Aaron tried to bring their dream of living in an off-the-grid, hand-built cabin deep in the Minnesota woods to life. It is during their time in the cabin that awakens Amy's love of food, of coaxing beauty, as well as both subtlety and vibrance, from homegrown fruits and vegetables, as well as meats.

But the time she spends in New York City, as much as she feels it embraces her talents, leaves her longing for the solitude of their cabin, and inspires her journey to better understand her culinary heritage from the beginning. It's a journey that shapes her and her career, as well as her path for her future.

"I'd spent years trying to erase those homely flavors from my past, but when I gave my nostalgia an inch, it ran down the road a mile. Like an archaeologist picking in the hard-packed clay, I felt a need to return home to excavate the old flavors and all the feelings I'd ever tied to them."

At one point when she is trying to decide what to do with her life, Thielen considers being a food writer. It's certainly another career path which would bring her success, because she is a tremendously talented writer, able to paint sensory pictures in your mind's eye with her words. Of course, my snap reaction to this book, with its vivid, beautiful descriptions of complex gourmet dishes, comfort foods, fresh fruits and vegetables?

Beyond wanting to gnaw the seat of the airline passenger in front of me (serves him right for trying to recline his seat back into my lap anyway), I loved the emotions and the ideas that this book conveyed. You can certainly see why Thielen has succeeded in her career, and it was enjoyable to read about her artist husband and how his dream of the cabin in the woods really inspired her life's work. They're certainly a remarkable pair!

My one criticism of the book is the jumbled timeline—one second Thielen is working in New York, then she and Aaron are moving to Minnesota, then she's a teenager, then she's back in New York—at times it just got very confusing.

But in the end, that's a small price to pay because the book is so compelling, so enjoyable, and so hunger-inducing. If you're fascinated by chef stories, if you're a foodie, or if you just to like to eat, pick up Give a Girl a Knife. And have some food nearby!!