FEEDING CHRISTINE

Memory, tradition, and family are the ingredients for a tale about how food can save the soul.

Bread and Roses is an upstate New York catering firm run by four very different women: Teresa DiRosa, the owner, who puts her whole heart and soul into the business, especially now that her husband has divorced her and her son, who isn’t speaking to her, has just left for college; Delia, Teresa’s girlhood friend, who can’t cook but has a winning way with people and handles promotion; Amberlin, who bakes; and Teresa’s niece Christine, who helps with odds and ends, rounding out the cozy family of four. But something goes sorely amiss when Teresa, Delia, and Amberlin begin the two-day preparation for their annual Christmas open house and enormous feast: namely, that Christine shows up in the early morning with a gun in her purse, wanting to kill herself. Teresa, already guilty about not having done enough to help her now-dead sister Nan (Christine’s mother), in an irrational but practical fit hits her suicidal niece with a frying pan and ties her up in the cellar. The others are aghast when they discover what’s transpired but seem equally baffled about how to proceed. So the three work at rolling dough and slicing salmon while Christine waits to be untied. She’s fed up with her own life, including the awful childhood she had with her alcoholic and maybe schizophrenic mother; a psychiatrist fiancé who now thinks she may be nuts; and the seven-year anniversary of her mother’s suicide, which happens to coincide with the big party. Interwoven throughout are the memories of the four women, and gradually reconciliation emerges. Teresa’s memories of her Italian grandmother give her the hope that nourishment—of one kind or another—can make Christine well.

Four likable women and an unusual plot that lets readers learn to know them: a fine debut.