A highly educated foodie’s dream, this tale delivers a unique take on both the campus and mystery genres.
Newton (Tasting Home, 2013) makes her fiction debut with a cooking-focused whodunit set at a California college in the late 1990s.
Emily Addams, the story’s narrator, is the head of the women’s studies program at Arbor State, a former land-grant school that, as the millennium approaches, faces budgetary issues. As per usual, programs like Emily’s are the first on the chopping block, as the higher-ups plan to absorb women’s and ethnic studies into larger departments like humanities or social sciences. While Emily schemes with her colleagues on how to fight this reorganization, a scandal rocks the campus. Peter Elliot, a professor of plant biology, is found poisoned in the college’s hog yard and taken to the hospital. Peter has his enemies on campus: he is an outspoken proponent of pesticides and genetically modified foods. But Emily becomes a prime suspect because Peter was found with a piece of cornbread in his hand—it contained ingredients from a recipe that she is well-known for. And she had just brought her cornbread to a college event. Emily is cleared of the crime, but the fact that she was implicated arouses her suspicions, so she begins to investigate the incident, relying on her network of female faculty members to dig into Peter’s many secrets. On top of saving her program and solving a mystery, Emily has to juggle her teaching responsibilities; time with her daughter, Polly; and a romance with a new beau, a math professor. The novel, while dealing with heavy subjects, maintains a light and airy tone. The prose is more focused on driving the plot than lingering on descriptions, except when Emily and her colleagues speak, often very informatively, about their fields. To add to the fun, Newton puts a recipe at the end of every chapter for a dish that was mentioned in that part, giving the text a nice interactivity. Emily is a well-rounded, inquisitive character whom the reader gets to know well; the rest of the players are somewhat flatter, often acting as props for the propulsion of the plot. That plot, however, is intriguing and full of twists, and it’s hard to find fault with the author’s theme of communal empowerment, her love of food, and her frequent instructional asides.
A highly educated foodie’s dream, this tale delivers a unique take on both the campus and mystery genres.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63152-212-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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