Cooking Your Way To A Better Life?

Miss Cecily's Recipes for Exceptional Ladies by Vicky Zimmerman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Reader, I skimmed back through the book to find the most intriguing recipe titles; then I glanced at the back of the book, to find them there as well. If you’re intrigued by the following, you’re going to enjoy the book, I’ll venture.
“Tea for a Crotchety Aunt”, “Breakfast with a Hangover”, “Dinner for a Charming Stranger”—recipes with advice for food, life, and love.
When I picked up the book, I was expecting a feel-good story about a woman who starts volunteering at an old-folks’ home, and figures out her life thanks to advice from a crotchety old lady with a heart of gold. What I got was a story with more depth, about an intergenerational friendship that made me laugh and cry.
Kate is a modern British woman, working an ok job in marketing at a food emporium and trying to bring an ok boyfriend up to scratch so she can start married life. On her fortieth birthday, she and Nick are on vacation in France when he admits, no, he doesn’t want to move in together after all, and Kate has to move back in with her mother temporarily since she’d already given up her flat share. Seeing her floundering in chaos, Kate’s friend talks her into volunteering as a way to get out of her head. Unfortunately, the kitten socializing program is full, so that leaves the care home.
Cecily is 97, and she’s been waiting to die for years. She’s impatient, sad, and angry. She can’t enjoy her books any longer, and reading was the only thing that made her life bearable. She’s forgotten more about food than any of the other ladies ever knew, and she’s not impressed with Kate’s first efforts at the cooking demo. One thing age can bring is honesty over social convention; despite a rocky start Cecily and Kate talk about the reality of their lives and friendship develops, giving two lonely people the opportunity to move on from fed up with life to feeding the soul.
It’s a perfect read for this holiday season, when friends and family remain physically distant to protect the vulnerable; there’s always comfort food, but sometimes we need to reach out in new ways to learn new recipes for life and love.

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Recipe For Danger

Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook by Celia Rees
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is getting quite the checkouts at the library, deservedly so. Rees based her spy novel on the possibilities and silences of her own family history, and takes us back to the beginnings of the Cold War: Germany, 1946.
Edith Graham has been more lucky than plucky in life, but that’s all about to change. As modern world wars chewed up the available able-bodied men, necessity opened opportunities for women to do more. Edith spent the war teaching in Coventry; she applies to go to Germany, to help re-establish schools after the war. Her sneaky cousin recruits her to try to find someone they knew before the war; it turns out he was a member of the Nazi High Command.
She’s led to assume that von Stavenow is to be punished, but she finds out that there’s a competition between the governments of Britain, the USA, and Russia to simply recruit the Nazi top brass and scientists to work for them. The Nazis, of course, would love to be whisked off to new lives and new identities instead of be jailed or suffer alongside their countrymen, starving in the rubble and devastation.
Edith’s friends think that those who risked and lost their lives in the war deserve to see the work of the Nazis buried rather than continuing in other countries; they ask her to work for them as well. They’re also trying to find an internal traitor in the War Office and evidence is disappearing in the postwar “cleanup”. Edith is drawn in because of her idealism and her connections, and it’s her idea to send messages through recipes on postcards, using a popular cookbook as the code. What she’s really trying to figure out, though, is how can people you love and share good times with go home and torture other people?
Rees doesn’t gloss over the privations and atrocities of wartime, nor the dangers of spying. She’s not shy depicting the difference between those who want justice, those who want payback, and those who just want to continue living the high life, either.
The Cold War is the war I grew up with: Britain and the USA against Russia; posturing and propaganda on the surface, proxy wars in Asia, South America, and the Middle East. Like Edith, I’m forced to admit that war continues.

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Say Amen to Bring On the Blessings

Bring on the Blessings by Beverly Jenkins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the feel-good series I’ve been searching for since March. I saw an announcement that Al Roker bought television rights to the Blessings series, renaming it Hopetown and focusing on foster kids that find their forever families. I was hoping for a combo of Mitford, Miss Julia, and Tyler Perry; I got that and more.
Here’s the setup:ex-social worker Bernadine Brown catches her husband cheating on her—on her fifty-second birthday, no less. She hires a lawyer and ends up with $275 million. Raised in the church, she knows that when much is given much is expected, so she asks God to send her a purpose.
The purpose turns out to be a town: Henry Adams, Kansas, one of the last surviving townships founded by freed slaves after the Civil War. The failing town is for sale on the Internet; Bernadine buys it.
In book one, we meet all the characters: the people of Henry Adams, including town mayor Trent July, from one of the founding families; Bernadine; and the foster kids and families that are going to move into Henry Adams and make new lives for themselves. As the series continues, we get more in-depth and meet more characters. I’ve always been a sucker for inspirational fiction, for orphan stories and found families, and these books (I’m halfway through the ten-book series now) hit just the right heart notes.
In addition to the love stories in each volume, we get bonuses of Black history, some of which I knew—there are Black towns in Arizona, too—some of which was new to me, like the Black Seminoles who did a long walk to Texas and still reside there. The July family is one of those split, like the tribes of Southern Arizona who are split across the international border.
I highly recommend these stories, told with humor and grace. There’s a long-running thread of a man who loves his pig more than anything, which was particularly funny to me after seeing the 2020 America’s Got Talent. There’s a strong current of Spirit in these books, also—both inside and outside the church.
I’m so grateful to have found these stories of faith and community that remind me that every day, people do work together and good things do happen—especially when love and kindness are applied.

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Love as Long and Deep and Wide as the Universe

The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Here’s why this book will be on my top books of 2020: when you read the 6 blurbs on the back of the book, they state with confidence a completely different interpretation of the book. Kirkus: what they’d sacrifice for progress. Publishers Weekly: failing to learn from one’s mistakes. Booklist: found families and lost loves. Indra Das: galactic progress and its crushing fallout. Kate Elliot: blistering commentary on capitalism and colonialism. Library Journal: emotional attachment with time travel? Did they get a prepub draft instead of a preprint galley? It goes through time, but the only real time travel is memory and frozen on a space ship-not “time travel” to most sci-fi readers.
At any rate, Simon Jimenez has reached the pinnacle of the novelist’s true dream: to speak in tongues, so that all who read get the message they need. Told through space opera; more of an intellectual and emotional space opera than the shoot ‘em up kind. The shoot’em up kind don’t usually leave lingering flute music in your dreams. Though it may inspire some martial music in your soul. Read, ponder, weep and wonder. Truly an epic.
My take? The theme is the vast, unknowable consequences of love.

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I entered a sweeps for this book because it was written for me: I’m one of those people avoiding Facebook because people I love dearly are expressing views I disagree with, and I’m afraid to have a confrontation that might devolve to yelling and loss—even if it’s virtual. I’m upset to see the same kind of unrest I grew up with in the 1970s repeating. I know the media is highlighting extremists to sell stuff, but I sputter into incoherence when talking politics—so how do I find out the reasons my neighbors might have for voting for platforms that seem deeply dangerous (to me)? I need help. The psychologist author advocates dialogue as the route to cross the divide, rather than debate or even civil discourse; that sounds doable, even for introverts. It’s worth the wade through stilted prose to read this book; it’s also a refresher on your freshman speech class. Using cousins Kevin the liberal and Celine the conservative, whose kids want them to socialize again, the author walks you through careful conversations. Aside from the clunky suggested scripts, the principles are sound, and it’s full of further resources. The first thing the author asks you to do is figure out your motivations for talking. Discourse is proving your point, debate is for conversion, but dialogue means listening and understanding. We all want the other guy to switch to our way of thinking, but that’s not realistic or useful. One party or another is going to prevail and the rest of us have to deal, so I really do want to find common ground and understanding of others—even if we do agree to disagree. That might be the true definition of democracy, after all. What I found most immediately helpful in this book were two charts: one that shows the Miserable Majority, where studies find that only 33% of us are extremists, and the other 66% of us really do just want to get along; the other shows the moral underpinnings of conservatives and liberals—and everyone I know uses both sides of this chart that references loyalty, respect, justice, and compassion. I have more hope for our country after reading this book. If I’m not quite ready to have a dialogue yet, I’m ready for the work.

On Persuasion

The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The jacket copy says that fans of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir will enjoy this book; I’m a fan of the first and not of the second, but I did enjoy this historical fiction tribute to Jane Austen and her fans. I think the book was written expressly for them; deeper familiarity with her novels would certainly enhance the reading. I’m not sure that it will convert those unfamiliar with her work; it didn’t inspire me to reread Austen, but it kept my interest because it celebrates reading.
Jenner has invented a group of characters who form the Jane Austen Society in the post-WWII village of Chawton (Austen’s historic home). In homage to Austen, she concentrates on illustrating issues of class and romantic expectations in the closed-environment Petri dish of an English village; in service to her own muse, there’s a 21st Century perspective that makes it more bearable to me than Austen’s own works. The author’s outlier characters, Evie and Adam (oh, the symbolism—but no, there’s a huge age gap and they’re never associated romantically) are the ones who made the book interesting to me. I really liked them. Adam, a village farmer, discovers Austen from the visit of an American girl on Austen pilgrimage in 1932, thereby obtaining the gift of companionship and wisdom that books can bring to a lonely life. Evie’s introduced to Austen in school by the dynamic village teacher. Though she has to leave the village school before graduation in order to work in the manor where Austen once lived, she has her master reading list and she’s able to nurture her native intelligence through access to the manor library.
Most of the other characters are flawed but sympathetic, just like real life. The village doctor, the village lawyer, and the lady of the manor all have starring roles, along with the teacher and the American—later a movie star who never lost her love for Austen—her movie producer fiancé, and a Sotheby’s assistant director of estate sales. Couples find happiness and the entwined threads all tie up nicely in the end. I’ll look forward to another book from the author, especially if she steps further from Austen’s shadow.

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Post-Apocalypse Hope

A Beginning at the End by Mike Chen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The current crop of apocalyptic sci-fi books shows clearly that fiction is a form of thought experiment and that science fiction is really about the present time. I’ve got at least 4 books stacked by my chair that I’ve had to put down because the authors picked pandemic for their apocalypse and I don’t want to read about them. Chen was coming to the Tucson Festival of Books so I started reading his book with its hopeful title in March, having forgotten—if I knew—that he picked pandemic, too. I was able to keep reading this one. Chen’s book centers around people, not ideas, and that’s why it’s readable and hopeful in the current situation.
A decade after a global pandemic wiped out most of the planet’s population, the survivors are rebuilding the country, split between self-governing cities, hippie communes and wasteland gangs. The poor, as always, are stuck in one place or the other. Tensions are rising again, along with the threat of new outbreaks. The plot centers around Moira, a former child star voice artist who’s been hiding from her domineering stage dad for years; Rob, a single dad who has to keep proving to social services that he deserves custody of his daughter Sunny; and Krista, an event planner with a big heart and radical friends. Their challenges are both personal and communal, with society in such flux, but people of good heart usually find a way to achieve their dreams, especially with a little help from friends—and they do.
There’s definitely a difference between the newer sci-fi authors and the Boomers; Chen is definitely new school. The real feat that Chen pulls off is to embed his hopefulness in an engaging plot, with likable characters, and to keep the politics offstage and out of total war, through compromise. Usually in these books there are clear winners and losers; Chen has written a way into the future that is workable and believable because the only thing that works in our lived reality is compromise: nobody wins everything but nobody loses everything, either. If only the politicians would quit living in the fantasy worlds of total domination and move into the world where the rest of humanity resides. Books like this remind us of what’s really possible. Recommended.

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