The Oak Papers by James Canton

Posted on February 26, 2021 by pagesofjulia

These tender ruminations on oak trees, connections and possibilities will appeal to nature lovers, philosophers and seekers.

James Canton (Ancient Wonderings; Out of Essex) spends hours, days, months and years with one particular oak tree. Moved by its power and continually fascinated by its individuality, Canton undertook a study of the connection between oaks and people. After consulting history, mythology, spirituality, science, a number of individual woodmen and -women, and more time spent in the company of oaks, he offers The Oak Papers, part personal reflection and part research project.

The Honywood Oak, at the Marks Hall Estate near London, draws Canton in. During a period of personal turmoil, he finds himself sitting under this massive 800-year-old tree, “a mere sapling when the Magna Carta was signed.” He watches birds and insects and hares, and the changing seasons; he finds himself returning just to spend time with the Honywood Oak: “I sit on the bench and wonder a duality of desires: to care for the oak and to be cared for by the oak.” He feels a healing effect. Canton’s more purposeful studies begin in the company of the estate’s “curator of trees,” and in his readings: Dante, T.S. Eliot, Pliny, Shakespeare, Woolf, Thomas Hardy, Gary Snyder and the legends of Druids and Green Men (and Green Women and Children). He gets to know the Honywood Oak in its fine details, and then individuals he calls the Field Oak and the Stag-Headed Oak. He meets with Stephen Taylor to discuss his Oak, a collection of dozens of paintings of the same tree.

“A few more leaves have turned to paler autumn shades like the grey hairs on a father not seen for months.” The Oak Papers is meticulous and dense with detailed observations not only of oaks–the seasonal variations in their leaves, buds and acorns–but of the lives they support: heron, treecreeper, wren, goldcrest, buzzard, stiletto fly, wood butterfly, mosses, lichen, hare, gall wasp. The bulk of these papers sees Canton sitting and watching, although he also recounts visits with people who know oaks well: artists and craftspeople who work with wood, spiritual thinkers, a psychologist who specializes in nature therapies. He lovingly concludes that “there are many paths to seeking the truths about oaks,” that “we all become better beings when we step back into the woods.”

Canton meditates on oaks while sitting in oaks, seeking greater understanding or to become the oak. He does not reach a conclusion by the end of these pages, but he gets closer.

This review originally ran in the February 5, 2021 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 details.

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A Shape in the Dark: Living and Dying with Brown Bears by Bjorn Dihle

Posted on February 22, 2021 by pagesofjulia

A lifelong Alaskan inspires awe with his beautifully written, expert portrait of the grizzly bear.

Bjorn Dihle was born and raised in the outdoors of Alaska, where he has worked for years as a brown (or grizzly) bear viewing guide. A Shape in the Dark: Living and Dying with Brown Bears is his lovely, thoughtful study on the relationship between humans and this evocative, storied species.

“There have been times I almost hated bears,” he writes. “Like most feelings of hostility, mine were rooted in fear. Yet, there is no place I love more than grizzly country, and no animal has intrigued and challenged me more than the bear.” Moving around in time, Dihle tells his own stories of encounters, from the first brown bear he ever saw–a carcass in a salmon stream when the author was four or five years old–through early trailside meetings and learning how to relate to bears, into his career seeking them out, especially on Alaska’s Admiralty Island. “There’s no way to make bears safe,” Dihle acknowledges, which is surely part of their appeal. But there are measures, such as Larry Aumiller’s “concept of habituation, which he defined as taking away the fight-or-flight response in a bear, that’s key for developing trust between our two species.”

A Shape in the Dark is an appealing, accessible memoir and a history of the interplay of bears and humans in the American West. Dihle intersperses his own and his friends’ bear encounters with those of Grizzly Adams and Teddy Roosevelt, outlining the evolution of attitudes and policy toward grizzlies. In considering the writings of John Muir and Aldo Leopold, he reviews the history of wilderness thinking beyond bears, with a ruminative style and personal perspective. He writes of famous and less famous maulings, the complexities of bear hunting, the role of grizzly bears in native cultures and the impact of climate change on Alaska and its greatest predator.

Dihle’s title hints at something elemental about our fears and the way he handles them: “After a while, much like our ancestors who’d built fires to keep away the monsters, I opened my laptop and stared at the lit-up screen, hoping the words would come.” As his subtitle suggests, Dihle deals with life and death in balanced proportions, portraying the deaths of bears and humans with similar reverence.

Quiet, meditative, wise, well informed, A Shape in the Dark is memoir, history and philosophy in one: “everything leaves a trail, whether it’s imprinted in the land, in the narratives we tell, or even in our blood.” Dihle’s love for his subject is contagious and beautifully conveyed.

This review originally ran in the February 4, 2021 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 wigeons.

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Gay Bar: Why We Went Out by Jeremy Atherton Lin

Posted on February 17, 2021 by pagesofjulia

This superb, multifaceted book takes a close look at gay bars individually and as concept, in history and in the author’s life, tackling big questions with wisdom and grace.

Jeremy Atherton Lin brings a wise, wry voice to his masterful Gay Bar: Why We Went Out. This thoughtful study is part memoir, part research project, part travelogue and a large part classic essay-as-assay, seeking answers on the page. His subtitle indicates a wondering: Why did we go out? The answers are various; they change over time and of course are personal for Lin, but he progresses toward an understanding of what the gay bar really was, is and might be. “The question arises as to what distinguishes an enclave from a quarantine, and whether either is any longer necessary.” If gay no longer needs a bar, is this a victory, or a loss?

“A salon of effete dandies engaged in witty banter, a lair of brutes in black leather, a pathetic spot on the edge of town flying a lackluster rainbow flag for its sole denizen–one lonely hard drinker. Of course, a gay bar can be all these things and more.” Gay Bar is a personal history and a history in the traditional, researched sense: it relates Lin’s coming-of-age as well as a world of gay bars, from the scintillating to the sordid, dating back hundreds of years. Seven sections are devoted to locations–bars or neighborhoods–and represent epochs, both in Lin’s life and in the lifetime of the gay bar. Lin’s specific bars are located in London, Los Angeles and San Francisco, over the course of decades. He ranges through LGBTQ topics including protests, hate crimes, the gay rights movement, relationships with law enforcement, Stonewall and Harvey Milk, and gay-bar topics of sexual consent, music, booze, poppers and pills. Lin considers race, gender and class, and questions exploitation and appropriation. His broader subjects include community and identity, bar and nightlife culture, people’s relationships to place and more–this book has something for every reader.

Lin’s writing is consistently intriguing, descriptive and lovely: “the cranes and glassy high rises hover like chaperones.” As narrator he is by turns pensive, funny, self-deprecating, exasperated and reverent; he can be delightfully suggestive. “A pipe spilled chlorinated water. The brickwork had grown mossy down the length of its trajectory, like a viridescent trail-to-adventure on the building’s belly.” Gay Bar is enriched by the voices of others–thinkers in history, philosophy, literature and queer theory–but Lin never loses his own. This exploration is personal, deeply researched, smart and essential.

This review originally ran in the January 29, 2021 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 mirrors.

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We Run the Tides by Vendela Vida

Posted on February 15, 2021 by pagesofjulia

An uncertain adolescent girl narrates a heart-aching tale of coming of age in a city in transition.

We Run the Tides by Vendela Vida (The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty) is a dreamy, tricky tale of girlhood, secrets and the shifting sands of truth set in mid-1980s San Francisco. This captivating coming-of-age novel asks readers to consider friendship, cruelty, deception and consequences.

Narrator Eulabee begins her story with the first-person plural point of view. “When I say ‘we,’ I sometimes mean the four of us Sea Cliff girls who are in the eighth grade at the Spragg School for Girls. But when I say ‘we,’ I always mean Maria Fabiola and me.” The foursome is close, but it is beautiful Maria Fabiola who enraptures Eulabee and, apparently, everyone else–children as well as adults–in their rarified world. Theirs is a neighborhood of au pairs, chauffeurs and views of the Golden Gate Bridge. “Sea Cliff is for solitude, for when you want to protect yourself from people.” Bad things still happen here, but the community handles them in whispers, while looking away.

Earnest, awkward, devoted Eulabee is perhaps less polished than her friends, or perhaps it only seems so because readers are privy to her insecurities. The trouble begins when she and Maria Fabiola fail to see a minor event in the same way, literally. Did Eulabee miss a small, important detail? Or did Maria Fabiola make it up? The truth almost doesn’t matter; what matters is that the girls are equally firm in their divergent truths. An insignificant moment snowballs until Eulabee’s world is shattered. Lives may be endangered; the foursome disintegrates; nothing will ever be the same again. “I stand there, on the cusp of the ocean and listen to its loud inhale. And then it recedes and takes everything from my childhood with it–the porcelain dolls, the tap-dancing shoes, the concert ticket stubs, the tiny trophies, and the long, long swing.”

We Run the Tides is an enchanting, literary novel, realistic but a little unreal. Vida gives a tender, incisive portrayal of adolescence. The girls’ cruelties are visceral and impermanent, the stressors of Sea Cliff somehow both superficial and profound. Decades later, the events of 1984-85 remain “part of the lore. The newspapers called what happened the Sea Cliff Seizures,” and in adulthood, Eulabee both has and has not outgrown them. Her friends and classmates have moved on; San Francisco has changed. “Symphonies of tiny violins play themselves to shreds.” And Vida’s readers will be changed, too, by this cleverly woven story about honesty, betrayal, charm and illusion, about what matters in youth and what matters always.

This review originally ran in the January 26, 2021 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 text messages.

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author interview: Katherine Seligman

Posted on February 8, 2021 by pagesofjulia

Following my review of At the Edge of the Haight, here’s Katherine Seligman: Strayed Lives.

Katherine Seligman has been a staff writer at the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine and a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and USA Today. Her stories have appeared in Redbook, Life, Time, Al Jazeera America and the anthology Fresh Takes. She is a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto and loves working in clay. Her debut novel, At the Edge of the Haight, is the 10th winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.

What event or person inspired this story?

photo by Penni Gladstone

One night my husband and I were driving home through Golden Gate Park and this man threw himself in front of our car, saying, “Help, don’t leave me.” We stopped and called the police. He was pointing, and they shone the light over there, and there was a body on the ground. My husband, who’s been an ER doctor, ran over to see if there was anything he could do, and what he saw was this kid gasping for his last breath. They arrested the man who’d stopped us, and nothing ever happened to him. Because there were two witnesses, and one was dead. I tried to find out what had happened, asking questions of people who had been living in the park, and I just wasn’t getting anywhere. One of the cops said to me, “We have no idea what happened, but neither of these guys was up to any good.” And I just started thinking about this kid who died, and what his life had been like. That was what started it off. I had always talked to people on the streets who were traveling through or living here, but I started doing it with a new purpose, and I just started writing.

How are journalism and novel-writing alike and different?

I started out writing fiction in college and a year or two after college, and then went into journalism because I really didn’t have any idea what I wanted to write about. I felt like I was manufacturing things. I continued as a journalist, but never gave up the idea of writing fiction. I wrote two novels before this that are still drafts, and when I got to this one, I felt like I had learned more. It just carried me through the process. I think the natural curiosity and the rhythm of having deadlines and sitting down and knowing that you have to write helped me. I did have a great desire to do it, and some background, but there are some land mines for journalists who write fiction. I can see them in my work, and in other works. You can enter into research rapture, and think everything is so interesting, when it’s not important.

What makes a good protagonist?

Someone who inhabits a world so completely that we believe it. It doesn’t always have to be somebody that you really like or trust, as we know–there are so many books where we completely doubt or dislike the protagonist. But there has to be some element of belief in what this character is doing, and the character has to be revealed in some way. There has to be something that is driving them, often some big discovery, something the reader learns about the protagonist.

What happens inside Maddy is often as important as what happens outside. Why?

I played with writing from a close third person, and from two and then three points of view, but I came around to the first person, inside her head, because I really wanted to show how someone could get into a situation like this. That someone you see on the street often isn’t so different from your own child, or your sister. I know people say that, but I actually believe that that’s true. I really wanted a first-person voice that felt like she was learning while she was going. She didn’t know everything. That’s someone who we could look at and find some level of understanding of what she was going through, because there are a lot of things about herself that she doesn’t know. She’s so hurt. She’s somebody who really wants to hide, which I think is a fairly common human trait. I think there are a lot of people who go through life with so many secrets, trying to hide.

Did you do research specifically for this novel?

I did a number of stories over the years on various homeless issues, and a couple about what was going on in my own neighborhood, raising children, and why we stayed in the Haight.

I went to the hospital and sat and watched people come in. I spent a lot of time in the courts. I went and watched the disposition of cases of homeless people who’d been arrested and listened to how they were treated. The police were very generous, talking to me from their perspective. I did additional research, but in a different way than I did as a journalist, more talking and absorbing. There were a couple of kids who were very generous in spending time with me, answering questions about what it felt like to be awakened at 4 and 5 in the morning when they were sleeping in the park. A lot of the things that happened in the book, not the specific plot but some of the details, are things that actually happened. This neighborhood is so full of color and life. You just never know when you’ll find somebody walking a chicken on a leash down the street. There was actually a young woman many years ago who had a rat that she kept in her sleeve, and she taught it–she’d give it a juice box and it would drink through the straw. She told me what went into training this rat, and it was great.

What message do you hope readers take away from this story?

I hope that people will realize that someone who you walk by has a very full life story, just as you do. I don’t mean it in any finger-shaking kind of way, but I believe that our lives are richer when we open our eyes to what’s around us. It doesn’t matter where you live. And I realize that some people feel threatened, and there are really complicated things going on out there on the street. We have to have basic respect for people who are living on our streets, and they have to have respect for the neighborhood. I hope people will open their eyes and realize there’s a person out there who might have a lot in common with you and your family. Just be open to that. And there are many people with drug and alcohol problems who can be violent, but for the most part they’re people whose lives have strayed from what we consider typical, and who find themselves on the street. In my neighborhood often there are travelers and seekers who are following something that they think is going to be magical.

I didn’t set out to write about homelessness per se; it was just this idea that you walk by people every day and you have no idea who they are, what they’re hiding, what their lives are like. I guess that’s what interests most novelists. I can just look across the street in somebody’s window and think, huh. What’s going on over there? And I think we all have that element of make-believe.

This review originally ran in the January 19, 2021 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

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Sophomores by Sean Desmond

Posted on February 3, 2021 by pagesofjulia

A boy begins to find himself as his parents face private battles of their own in this poignant and searching novel.

With Sophomores, Sean Desmond (Adam’s Fall) evokes late-1980s Dallas and its suburbs with eerie precision. A nuclear family–father, mother, son–and the worlds they navigate are full of anxieties, choices and possibilities. Spanning just one school year, this is a novel to get lost in.

In the fall of 1987, Dan Malone is a sophomore at the Jesuit College Preparatory School of Dallas. He belongs to a tight foursome of boys who support each other at school and in their forays with the girls of Ursuline Academy. A bit tortured by his shyness in both areas, Dan’s interior workings are self-consciously earnest but endearingly real. “Dan felt a sudden awareness, a shimmering sense of discovery, that his journal, the newspaper, music, writing, reading, it was all connected with some hidden purpose… The hour when he would take part in the life of the world seemed to be drawing closer, and Dan wanted to think and write and listen to his heart and find out what it felt.”

Dan’s father, Pat, is an airline executive facing a serious industry downturn, culturally Irish Catholic and miserably estranged by his displacement (for work) from his native Bronx. He drinks too much and hides it poorly from his family. He struggles with a recent diagnosis of multiple sclerosis.

Mother and wife Anne provides an essential counterpoint to Dan and Pat’s heavily male worlds. As a devout young woman, Anne had been a novice at Sisters of Charity, but she grew into a worldly, quietly feminist woman, inclined to be contrary in her internal monologues. Still a serious Catholic, Anne argues with the pastor both in her head and via anonymous phone calls.

These three perspectives triangulate to offer a rich, subtle story of family grief and love, teenaged seeking and adult angst. Desmond places crises in the classroom, where Dan strives for growth and recognition from a teacher “legendary for rigor and Socratic curveballs,” on equal footing with the murder trial where Anne serves as juror. Flashbacks to Anne’s and Pat’s pasts illuminate their characters and provide nuance and empathy. Events vary from the absurd (an ill-fated swim team trip) to the profane (one particularly colorful episode in Pat’s fall from grace), but throughout this narrative there is a sense that all of this is somehow serious, important, holy.

Sophomores is a sharp, crystalline look at a few months in the lives of a “regular” family. With a keen gaze, it captures a city in transition and a boy just coming of age. Dan and his parents will stay with the reader long after the story is finished.

This review originally ran in the January 8, 2021 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 sticks.

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At the Edge of the Haight by Katherine Seligman

Posted on January 13, 2021 by pagesofjulia

In this quietly compassionate novel, a young homeless woman stumbles into a crime scene on the edge of Haight-Ashbury, and eventually reconsiders how she got there.

Katherine Seligman’s gripping debut novel, At the Edge of the Haight, explores a community on the edge of a historic setting and on the edge of getting by, with a compelling protagonist and an array of issues to wrestle.

Twenty-year-old Maddy Donaldo lives in present-day Golden Gate Park, after Jerry Garcia and Janis Joplin are long gone, with a sort of chosen family. There’s Ash, “a skinny upside-down triangle” of a young man, “the most no bullshit guy around” with a talent for effective design of cardboard panhandling signs. Quiet, gentle, strawberry-blond Fleet has a pet rat named Tiny. Spike-haired Hope talks to everyone; she’s good with the tourists, but a bit of an instigator, too. And, most importantly, there’s Root, Maddy’s devoted dog. Together the friends scavenge food, find shelter, protect one another and navigate their tricky streets. It is Root who leads Maddy into the bushes in the first pages of this absorbing novel, where she stumbles upon a young man taking his last breath, and a man standing over him.

Maddy knows immediately that this sight will haunt her, that she is danger. She’s been handed a problem she didn’t earn; quickly the death of the boy named Shane follows her. The cops have questions. A man shows up at the local shelter and identifies himself as Shane’s father and asks for Maddy’s help. She gets to know Shane’s parents, Dave and Marva, and finds her loyalties beginning to split. Dave is a birdwatcher; Maddy observes the creatures, human and nonhuman, who live with her in the park. She investigates Shane’s murder, and along the way alienates her friends and finds herself nudged toward her own past, which she most wants to avoid.

At the Edge of the Haight is told in quiet prose from Maddy’s first-person point of view, so the reader is privy to her thoughts and fears, including an interiority that both protects and isolates her. All other characters are secondary, but this is a novel captivating in both its story and its characters. It is concerned with the social ills of homelessness, including addiction, mental health challenges and economics, without becoming polemic. The mystery of Shane’s death is a side plot, not the central focus; rather, it’s the situation that pressures the tenuous life Maddy has set up in the park. Seligman’s San Francisco is colorful and detailed. Readers are drawn into a challenging world with sympathetic characters, but it is Maddy’s internal turmoil that makes this novel memorable.

This review originally ran in the December 11, 2020 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 green apples.

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Maximum Shelf author interview: Erin French

Posted on December 25, 2020 by pagesofjulia

Following Monday’s review of Finding Freedom, here’s Erin French: Thinking of Each Chapter as a Dish.

Erin French is the owner and chef of The Lost Kitchen, a 40-seat restaurant in Freedom, Maine, that was named one of Time magazine’s World’s Greatest Places and one of “12 Restaurants Worth Traveling Across the World to Experience” by Bloomberg. Born and raised in Maine, French loves sharing her home region and its delicious heritage. French’s The Lost Kitchen Cookbook was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award. Her memoir, Finding Freedom: A Cook’s Story; Remaking a Life from Scratch, will be published by Celadon in April 2021.

photo: Erin Little

How are the creative pursuits of cooking and writing similar, and different?

There were many times when writing this book that I told myself to bring it back to what I know. When I create a dish, I always take myself there in my mind, to taste it, to smell it, to think about every detail and how the dish makes me feel before I even make it, and long before I write it into a menu. I took my moments in the kitchen and used them to help me shape this book. I took time to think and go deep in my mind to taste all the details before I wrote them down on the page. Sometimes, to keep myself from getting overwhelmed, I tried to think of each chapter as a dish, that would eventually make up an entire menu. Bit by bit, ingredient by ingredient. The big difference? No dishes to wash!

When and how did you know you needed to write this book?

One of my editors once told me, “Your next book is always the one you feel burning inside of you.” Although I think my agent was baffled when I told her that I wasn’t pitching her another cookbook! I started to feel this one burning inside of me and knew I had to tell it. I knew I needed to reprocess my story to avoid burying it and to understand how it shaped my life. I also knew that in so many moments of my darkness I felt so utterly alone, and I hoped that if I shared this story maybe it would help others who experience their own moments of hell see the hope for getting through it and the beauty that can prevail.

Was it cathartic?

It was challenging going back to these dark days in such depth, but it empowered me that much more to live through them a second time. There were some unsettled moments that I finally put to rest through writing this book. It was the best therapy session with myself I’ve ever had.

You’ve shared so much of yourself in these pages. Do you hold anything back? How do you navigate the sharing of personal detail and trauma?

I poured it all out in the pages of this book. How do you tell your story of struggles to triumph without sharing the most vulnerable, darkest details of your days? I made one rule for myself while writing this: if it’s not my story, it’s not mine to tell. There are people in my life who have hurt me, and through it I recognized things they had been through in their own lives, reasons that shaped them into the person they became and maybe made them behave the way they did. But that’s their story to tell, not mine.

What are you cooking this week?

While the restaurant is closed, I’m cooking lots at home. Our freezer is stocked for winter and my dry goods pantry is ready for a winter at home. This week’s favorites were curried lentil soup while sitting in front of the fire; lamb chops marinated with rosemary and garlic; roasted squash with apples and maple syrup; and a classic apple crisp with a big scoop of vanilla ice cream!

What are you working on next?

Covid has me multitasking like a crazy woman right now. Adapting to our new world and trying to keep the restaurant alive keeps me moving. I’m neck deep in a construction project, building out individual private dining cabins in the woods here at the mill in Freedom, and simultaneously renovating my Airstream, which will serve as the mobile kitchen to serve the cabins. I’m also building out our first ever online makers market, which we are filling with beautiful Maine-made goods for the holidays. Oh! And planning for next season’s series of outdoor dinners we will be holding.

This interview originally ran on November 30, 2020 as a Shelf Awareness special issue. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

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Maximum Shelf: Finding Freedom: A Cook’s Story: Remaking a Life From Scratch by Erin French

Posted on December 21, 2020 by pagesofjulia

Maximum Shelf is the weekly Shelf Awareness feature focusing on an upcoming title we love and believe will be a great handselling opportunity for booksellers everywhere. The features are written by our editors and reviewers and the publisher has helped support the issue.

This review was published by Shelf Awareness on November 30, 2020.

Erin French grew up in rural Maine, in the outdoors and in her father’s diner, where she began helping out in the kitchen at age 12. After a few years at college, she returned home to Maine, and faced challenges including young single motherhood; a difficult marriage and more difficult divorce; opening and then losing her first small restaurant; addiction and recovery. Eventually French moved back to her hometown of Freedom, where she would start again with her wildly successful The Lost Kitchen. These travels, pitfalls and victories she recounts in Finding Freedom: A Cook’s Story; Remaking a Life from Scratch. Renovation and redemption–of spaces and of herself–are central to her story.

This memoir begins mid-scene, with the nine-months-pregnant narrator, age 21, on break from a 16-hour shift at the family diner. The opening showcases the detailed, richly sensory food writing that permeates these pages, then flashes back, to describe French first entering the diner at age five; observing her father’s love for his work, his drinking and his limited ability to show love for his family; working in the kitchen and dreaming of escape. Finding Freedom centers around food, from childhood in the diner to young motherhood, when French supported herself with a small business baking cakes, cookies and pies, working retail in a cooking supply store and for a catering company. French picks up skills and ideas along the way and builds confidence until she is able to open a supper club and then the first The Lost Kitchen on the Maine coast. By this time, she has also picked up a husband, Tom, who turns out to be a heavy drinker, controlling and eventually abusive. From her problems with depression and anxiety, and the excruciating hard work and long days of restaurant work, she picks up prescriptions for Xanax, Ambien, Klonopin and more. This chapter of French’s story ends in rehab, with Tom seizing custody of her child and shuttering The Lost Kitchen, including “every whisk, every spoon, every spatula, and knife.”

But the cook (French resists the title “chef,” having no culinary degree or formal training) is scrappy, hard-working and resourceful. She adopts a dog, moves into a cabin without electricity or running water, fights for custody of her son and gets back into the kitchen. She first converts a dilapidated Airstream into a food truck for roving outdoor fine dining events on farms, in orchards and fields. And then another opportunity shows itself: the old mill in Freedom is finally gutted and renovated into the perfect, romantic setting for a small but picturesque dining room. The Lost Kitchen is reborn. Within a few short seasons, its limited reservations must be filled by postal lottery, more than 20,000 postcards “pouring in as though it were the North Pole.”

The spaces French occupies are lovingly built and restored. The first The Lost Kitchen is housed in a former bank building, a three-story gothic flatiron she describes in tender, glowing terms: “One by one I folded back the old wooden shutters and flung open the tall windows, letting light into spaces that had been dark for so long…. The place was dripping with character, with its hardwood floors, high ceilings, thick period molding, and doors with frosted glass and heavy hardware.” Its owners choose to take a chance on renting to French after a personal meeting and homemade meal. This process repeats with The Lost Kitchen’s reincarnation in Freedom: “The quiet rumors had been spreading around town about the old mill’s restoration, the same way they had about me.” In between, French must clean out and redecorate the cabin she lives in post-rehab on her parents’ land, and the Airstream trailer she uses to get on her cooking feet again. As the book closes, she has just purchased an old fixer-upper farmhouse “the color of strawberries.”

French excels in describing her passion for cooking and for pleasing people via food; she’s at her best detailing the foods themselves, and her mouth-watering writing is the heart of this memoir: “Hard-boiled quail eggs as bar snacks that you could peel-n-eat and dunk in a dust of celery salt.” “Fresh-from-the-fryer nutmeg-laced doughnuts.” “Fried chicken. Served cold, crispy, and juicy…. We could just hold it up in the air as the boat screamed through the waves to catch a bit of salty breeze before devouring it to the bone.”

Cooking and baking, flower arranging, the fine art of plating and the writing of this memoir contribute to a profile of a woman driven to create beauty even out of pain. The narrator’s voice is vulnerable, her trauma is real and visceral but, by the end, this is a delicious, feel-good redemption tale.

Rating: 6 nasturtiums.

Come back Friday for my interview with French.

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Barbershops of America: Then and Now by Rob Hammer

Posted on December 7, 2020 by pagesofjulia

Barbershops of America is a photographic tribute to a profession, an aesthetic and a community institution. Photographer Rob Hammer documents both “the old timers… like dinosaurs about to go extinct” and “the next generation,” in two distinct sections covering more than a thousand shops all over the United States. Images are only infrequently interrupted by quotations from barbers and their customers, so readers of this coffee-table book will revel most in the visual: elderly barbers and young, tattooed ones; beat-up barber chairs and decades of detritus; colorful signage, diverse clientele and what Hammer recognizes as the soul of these storied spaces. This collection of glossy documentary art is for lovers of culture, local color and traditions passed down across generations.

This review originally ran in the November 3, 2020 gift issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

Rating: 6 cool vintage chairs.

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