The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen (Jacques Pepin)

Hardcover

I've never seen any of Pepin's television programs nor have I read any of his cookbooks, so I brought nothing to this reading other than a slight familiarity with Pepin's name. I actually don't know if that colored my opinion of the book for good or ill... I guess it's possible I would've liked it more if it felt as though I were reading the history of an esteemed acquaintance; or perhaps I would have felt a keener disappointment at its barely-scratching-surface anecdotes.

It's not a difficult book to read, but it was very episodic "when I was x, this happened" (2-3 pages), "when I was x I did this" (2-3 pages), "I worked at this place for a chef that wasn't as charming or smart or good-looking as I" (4-5 pages -- but tweaked and pressed into service for several different job situations), and on and on. He's obviously an innovative chef with an interesting career behind him, but he's also vain and petty. His "me vs. him" narratives seem to assume that readers are in his corner by default.

The recipes included are probably the best part of the book, even though the one I've tried so far (Eggs Jeannette) was just OK -- I'll probably stick with the much-less complex but more flavorful deviled eggs in future. I have copied and plan to make a couple of the other dishes, but that doesn't mean I want to hear any more about the guy behind them.

C

The Diviner's Tale (Bradford Morrow)

Hardcover

Cassandra is a dowser -- walking land with a forked stick divining for the landowners where water might be hiding. While she's working a job in an empty valley alone, she comes across the hanging body of a teen girl. If only it'd still been hanging there when Cass returned to the spot later with the police...

Such a strong beginning! I was immediately drawn in, wondering if it'd been an apparition or if the killer, hiding nearby, had cut the girl down to hide her. Problem is, I seemed more interested in the girl than the author was. He got off on tangents and packed Cassandra's life far too full with "stuff": dead teenage brother, father succumbing to Alzheimer's, religious mom who looks down on the family divining, twin 11-year-old sons who call their mother "Cass" -- oh brother -- speak like pretentious college students and who were conceived during the first of a two-night stand with a married man, a platonic affair with her former fiance and currently married town sheriff who also happens to be her twins' godfather, and (I'm getting so completely bored of this serious issue being trotted out with such regularity) a childhood rape.

It just needed to be tightened up and the heroine given a bit more backbone. Also, the author should've spent at least an afternoon with pre-teen boys so that his attempts at their lines of dialogue might've resembled something that occurs in nature.

C-

Headlong (Michael Frayn)

Audiobook

This is one of those if it CAN go wrong, it DOES stories.

It starts off well enough. Our "hero" Martin is a family man with a little country home, down for a vacation with his wife and infant daughter. Because both Martin and his wife work in art, their neighbors the Churts -- privileged landowners down to the bottom of their money barrel -- ask them over to get their opinions about some of their paintings. And it's there that Martin first spies the painting that will become an obsession for which he will risk almost anything to possess. You know, it actually continues well enough too. It's often funny and, although he digs himself deeper with every comment, action, and scheme, Martin isn't ridiculous. His decisions make at least some sort of sense...enough so that I couldn't help but root for a couple of them to finally work rather than backfire on him.

The biggest problem was the fact that a good third of the thing was dry-as-dust art history and iconography and just plain-old-regular history. Ugh. I listened to this in the car and I'm just grateful I didn't fall asleep during those frequent lectures.

C-

Swamplandia! (Karen Russell)

Hardcover

The Bigtree family is going through a rough patch, to say the least. They own the tourist park of the title and, in good times, mother Hilola did a high-dive "swimming with the Seths" routine (Seth is the family's annoyingly overused nickname for every single one of their gators), Dad (or "Chief") wrestled gators for the crowd, their grandfather and founder of the park was part of the family, and the three kids sold tickets, gave guided tours of their makeshift Bigtree museum, and sold overpriced snacks and souvenirs.

Now Hilola's dead of cancer, Grandpa's gone senile and has been shipped off to a nursing home -- sorry, nursing boat, and the new attraction on the mainland is stealing all of the tourists away. So, how does the family cope? Well, big brother decides to move out and get a job at the rival attraction, Dad leaves his two teenage girls on their own while he disappears on a "business trip," the older sister decides to leave young Ava (age 13) to marry her long-dead ghost boyfriend, and Ava goes searching for her sister with The Bird Man, a strange guy with a feathered coat.

In short: the book's got some decent prose, but the story is all over the place and the people SUCK. What kind of a father leaves his girls in a swamp to fend for themselves, especially when he knows one of them has begun to show signs of mental illness? I also hated that the story line that held a bit of magic was brutally blown away without warning to reveal the disappointingly overused non-surprise of child molestation. By the end, I felt like I needed a shower more than the neglected filthy girls in the swamp.

D+

Case Histories (Kate Atkinson)

Hardcover

I'd love to see a movie of this story get made. Erm -- on second thought -- they'd probably just cock it up, so forget that.

I was sucked in immediately, then shortly put off when it looked as though this might be a collection of short stories, and then happily re-engaged when an earlier character popped back up after a few chapters. I like short stories well enough, but I was so interested in the initial situation that I needed to know what was next and was so glad that I was going to get an answer...or at least more information.

British private eye Jackson Brodie acquires a few new clients asking him to look into cold cases: a decades-old missing child case, a seemingly random murder, and tracking down an adopted child, now an adult. While juggling his new clients, an ex-wife, and an impossible long-standing client, he's also dealing with constant tooth pain and what seem to be deliberate attempts on his life. All of this sounds way over-the-top, but it's so wonderfully written that it doesn't matter in the least. Somehow it just worked and I ate it up.

There are currently three more novels featuring Jackson Brodie and I'm adding them all to my "to read" list.

A-

A Red Herring Without Mustard (Alan Bradley)

Hardcover

This is a "Flavia de Luce Novel" -- the third in a series about an 11-year-old lover of chemistry and amateur detective. I read the first (The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie) and liked it fine, though this will probably be the last time I seek her out.

Flavia, her obnoxious older sisters, her distant father, and her rapidly deteriorating genteel way of life are simply boring. Her adventures in crime-solving and delight at all things chemical just get old so fast. The book was a quick read, but I'll barely think about it again...there's just nothing much worth contemplating now that the last page has been read.

C+

The Winter of Our Disconnect (Susan Maushart)

Paperback

Such an interesting idea for an experiment: make the house a screen-free zone for 6 months. No computers, TVs, smart phones, or iPods -- if you want to talk to someone, you call them on a land line. If you want to poke someone, you have to get near enough to push your finger into their actual flesh. If you've simply got to do something on a computer, it's going to have to be at the library or a friend's house. And it gets even more interesting when three teens are (not altogether willing) participants in the experiment.

I love the idea here and would have truly enjoyed the book to be entirely in diary form -- we get 50 days or so worth of stingy entries sprinkled throughout the text. I wanted to know when and how stuff happened...not just be told that it did. And I was not interested in Mom's philosophizing (nor her incessant use of "LOL" -- even if it was meant ironically). The result of the experiment was, it seems, entirely positive. Grades went up across the board, sleep patterns were restored, family cohesiveness was rediscovered, meals became an event -- planned and enjoyed rather than grabbed and inhaled, and a musician was born. Quite a lot in such a short span of time.

For such an interesting premise, though, the book was really felt like a slog at times. The portions that breezed along were the diary bits. When the author rambled, however, I was usually just annoyed. She's a blogger, I believe, and her style of writing is much more suited to that. She seems to think it's her job to stretch a small thought into an entire page of text, usually by employing similes. Not everything has to be colorful -- sometimes a TV is simply heavy, it doesn't have to be as impossible to budge as somebody's husband during the football match.

Still, amazing story. Maybe I'll try it sometime and write an incredibly interesting diary about it.

B