Links

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Book Review - The Glass Kitchen - Linda Francis Lee

18404283
Title:  The Glass Kitchen


Review:   I’m so glad I was lucky enough to get a copy of this book. It has been a while since I've read a fun easy book filled with quirky lovable characters. It’s about a Texas girl named Portia, who, along with her two sisters, moves to the big apple. Portia has just left her cheating husband. She has lived trying to suppress the fact that she has “the knowing” her grandmother also had. The knowing is like a sixth sense that allows her to think and taste the food she needs to make even before she’s started cooking. Not only that, but the food improves people’s lives, their relationships and gives her a sense of what is really going on. A unique premise to be sure.

            With only her Grandmother’s recipes and her life goals kind of up in the air, she meets a man, Gabriel Kane and his two daughters. He happens to be the man trying to get her to sell the only thing she truly owns, her apartment. It gets a little complicated when she starts to work for him, and eventually fall for him. With thoughts of dishes to make, sisters needing her, her lack of money and her desires to continue in her grandmother’s footsteps, Portia has to make some hard life decisions. “The knowing” making it all the more difficult because she doesn’t know or understand why she feels the compulsion to make “blood orange ice” or whatever is thrown into her head. Not until it is made does she understand why the dish is useful.

            It is a lovely romantic story mixed with a bit of crazy and fantasy. The characters are eccentric and Portia and her sisters together are a riot. They are silly as only sisters can be. I would recommend this book to most everyone I know. I only have one caveat and that is (again) the sheer number of F-words. I know I sound like a broken record, but they really aren’t’ necessary! As a writer, I would think that you would be able to come up with many different words to adequately describe what’s happening or what a character is feeling. No need to throw in the F-word haphazardly. That’s my two cents. Have fun reading this charming story.

Thanks Heather for this review.

ISBN 9780312382278
Copyright:  2014
Pages:   384
Quick Review:  4 out of 5 stars
Where I got the book:    sent for review

Synopsis:  Portia Cuthcart never intended to leave Texas. Her dream was to run the Glass Kitchen restaurant her grandmother built decades ago. But after a string of betrayals and the loss of her legacy, Portia is determined to start a new life with her sisters in Manhattan... and never cook again.

But when she moves into a dilapidated brownstone on the Upper West Side, she meets twelve-year-old Ariel and her widowed father Gabriel, a man with his hands full trying to raise two daughters on his own. Soon, a promise made to her sisters forces Portia back into a world of magical food and swirling emotions, where she must confront everything she has been running from. What seems so simple on the surface is anything but when long-held secrets are revealed, rivalries exposed, and the promise of new love stirs to life like chocolate mixing with cream.

The Glass Kitchen is a delicious novel, a tempestuous story of a woman washed up on the shores of Manhattan who discovers that a kitchen—like an island—can be a refuge, if only she has the courage to give in to the pull of love, the power of forgiveness, and accept the complications of what it means to be family.
 Linda Francis Lee
Author Information:  Linda Francis Lee is a native Texan now calling New York City home. Linda's writing career began when her article "There Is No Finish Line" was published in her university's quarterly magazine. But she got sidetracked from writing when she started teaching probability and statistics. Later she found her way back to writing, and the Atlanta Journal Constitution called her breakout novel, Blue Waltz, "absolutely stunning."

Now Linda is the author of nineteen books that are published in sixteen countries around the world, in languages as diverse as Japanese and Russian. Two of her most recent novels are in development for feature films, and she is in the process of co-developing a television series set in her beloved Texas. Lee's next novel, her twentieth, is a large work of fiction about the redemption of a man, and will be released in 2011.
When Linda isn't writing, she loves to run in Central Park and spend time with her husband, family, and friends

Other Reviews:


No comments:

Post a Comment