Author: Linda Francis Lee
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.
Publisher:
St. Martin’s Press
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.
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