Review: Garden Spells, by Sarah Addison Allen (2008)

Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen:

The tree was situated toward the back of the lot. It wasn't very tall, but it grew long and sideways. Its limbs stretched out like a dancer's arms and the apples grew at the very ends, as if holding the fruit in its palms. It was a beautiful old tree, the gray bark wrinkled and molting in places. The only grass in the garden was around the tree, stretching about ten feet beyond the reach of its branches, giving the old tree its room.

Claire didn't know why, but every once in a while the tree would actually throw apples, as if bored. When she was young, her bedroom window looked out over the garden. She would sleep with her window open in the summers, and sometimes she would wake in the morning to find one or two apples on the floor.

Claire gave the tree a stern look. Occasionally that worked, making it behave.

Synopsis: Two sisters bring their secrets to the old ancestral home and cause all kinds of magical upheaval in a small North Carolina town.

(Not about food per se, but being fed)

Beach reading. That's what this is, beach reading. It's sunny and light and romantic and...uplifting. This book has not one iota of dark in it, despite the fact that one sister is on the run with her daughter from an abusive, controlling boyfriend, and one's an emotional shut-in. Everyone gets what they want, and moreover, what they need, which is rarely the same thing. There's also a wonderful little old lady wandering around giving people things without knowing why, and eventually she attracts a passel of wistful gay men looking for love. Which is how life should be, I feel.

When Claire Waverly's grandmother died, Claire stepped right into her footsteps and turned the family's magical recipes into a catering business, bringing the people of Bascom fine, gourmet charmed foods. After all, cooking and hiding in the Waverly mansion, tending the magic garden and resolutely refusing to interact with the rest of the world are what Claire does best. Right up until her prodigal sister Sydney returns, bruised and shaken, with her daughter Bay in tow. And then there's the staunchly oblivious, madly in love artist who's moved in next door.

So, I've seen this book listed as culinary fiction on more than a few sites, but for me this isn't a book about food per se, but being fed, and who you let feed you. Technically, there's food everywhere in the book, and yet no one really seems to eat, unless it's narratively important. A nifty trick, but one that wears thin about the middle of the book. It's a good thing that Allen can back up the relatively light weight of the narrative with prose that positively sparkles, leaping right off the page.

This house is haunted in a *good* way.

Review: A Taste for Murder, and A Dash of Death, by Claudia Bishop

A Taste for Murder by Claudia Bishop:

The statue of the man and his horse had been erected in 1868, two hundred years after the founding of the village. Something had gone awry in the casting process, and the General's face had a wrinkled brow and half-open mouth, leaving him with a permanently pained expression as he sat in the saddle. On occasion, roving hordes of Cornell students on spring break heaped boxes of hemorrhoid remedies at the statue's base, which sent the mayor into fits. Most years the statue sat detritus-free, except for the six-foot heap of cobble stones piled at the foot and used to crush the witch each year.

Synopsis: Innkeeper Sarah Quilliam and her sister must find out who ruined History Days for the town of Hemlock Falls, NY, when an unpleasant guest from the inn is squashed flat in front of a cast of thousands.

Earlier this year I read (and loved) Toast Mortem, the 16th entry in the Hemlock Falls mystery series. I'd tried, years ago, to get into this series and hated it, but have since revised my stance, based on that one book. That's right: I was wrong. I really dig this series.

The Quilliam sisters, Sarah and Meg, run the Inn at Hemlock Falls, a tiny town in upstate New York with a quirky cast of tens. Sarah, the innkeeper, sits on the City Council and is frequently pressganged into volunteering by the other council members. Case in point: she winds up volunteered to get squashed flat at the upcoming History Days, a festival that culminates in the re-enactment of Hemlock Falls' witch-hatin' days. Good call, City Council!

However, Sarah neatly ducks out of it by wrangling in an unpleasant guest who used to be a singing hot dog and now may or may not know who embezzled $300K from the hot dog people. On the day of the big event, however, it's the guest and not her ersatz mannequin who is squashed flat by the bloodthirsty re-enactors of Hemlock Falls. Enter Sarah and, when she's not busy throwing things at passersby, her chef sister Meg, who jump on solving the case.

It's not a bad book at all. I think my quibble with it the first time around is that the City Council members are just so darn mean to Sarah and she just sits there and takes it, which drove me crazy. Now, much less so. And, as a bonus, I totally did not remember I'd read this whole book through, so the ending came as a total surprise YET AGAIN. Three cheers for memory loss, y'all.

Berkley Prime Crime has released the first four books in the Hemlock Falls mystery series as two trade-paperback sized volumes which I am inordinately fond of. They have a nice heft to them, and prop up well on pillows. So of course I kept on reading, A Dash of Death, the second mystery in the series. Which I'd never read.

Okay in point of fact I stayed up til 5am reading it, because I couldn't put it down. So good. It really feels like there's a jump in quality from book 1 to book 2, and I just plopped down with the dogs and read it all the way through. Phenomenally good, even though this time I did guess the murderer correctly about a quarter of the way through.

Of the plot to the second one, I am simply going to leave you with the following quote from the book:

Quill found her patience wearing thin. "Harvey, if the town really insists on doing this, don't you think we should open it to little boys, too?" Neither man looked at her, which told Quill they'd discussed the possibility that she would bring it up.

"Women's lib," said Elmer. "Well, I guess we got to consider you feminists. Now, I'm all for women's lib, Quill, or should I say -- (this with heavy jocularity) -- "Ms. Quilliam, but I don't know as how we could get the town to support a beauty contest for boys. Now, if we had a category like Best Little Fisherman, or Best Little, I dunno, some more boy-like thing..."

"Best Little Bow Hunter?" Quill heard herself say. "Best Little Sport with a Shotgun? Best little penis?"

"Oh, my God," said Elmer.

"It's the gunshot wound," said Harvey. "Saw a lot of it with 'Nam."

"Harvey, you were never in 'Nam," said Elmer, "not even close."

"I didn't say 'in' 'Nam, I said 'with' 'Nam."

"Ayuh. You know what you need, Quill? A nice cup of coffee or something."

Quill went into the kitchen to get a nice cup of coffee or something.

"I'm losing it," she told her sister. "It's the gallery business all over again. One-way trips to remote mountain areas are starting to look attractive."

"Explain," said Meg.

Meg demonstrated the proper degree of outrage over the Little Miss Hemlock Falls Beauty Contest, loyally endorsed Quill's proposed category, and immediately began preparing cappuccino as a restorative.

It goes without saying that both books pass the Bechdel Test with flying colors. It's like if Elizabeth Bowen had taken up writing mysteries. And if that doesn't convince you, nothing will.

Lavender Lies, by Susan Wittig Albert (2000)

Lavender Lies by Susan Wittig Albert:

We settled ourselves in the wicker chairs, and I glanced around. The porch might have been a set for a 1930s movie, with an old oak icebox standing against one wall and a bench with a white enameled bucket and wash basin on the other, an embroidered hopsacking towel hanging above it. The painted floor was covered with a worn braid rug, on which lay several napping cats, like orange and white and gray dust mops.

Synopsis: Herbalist/sleuth China Bayles has six days to get her wedding to MacQuaid organized, and the dead real estate agent really isn't helping things.

So inconsiderate.

Man, I am just never going to read these in anything resembling the right order.

Unlike the Travis McGee stories (still hunting that Quick Red Fox and he's damn quick, let me tell you) and the Agent Pendergast books, which I maintain a religious zeal for reading in order, I keep stumbling across these China Bayles mysteries and going hey, that cover looks awesome, gimme. This one's butter-yellow with lavender blossoms on, one of my favorite color combos ever.

Shallow browser, thy name is oddmonster.

This book actually follows the last one I read, Chile Death, like directly, and once I figured that out it was kind of surprising and a little disjointed, like I had to remember the events of the book she was talking about. I think I like my way better.

Anyway, usually I hate wedding stories. Hate them with a passion (yes, I basically had to be kidnapped to attend my own wedding)(although I did get a boat ride out of it) but this one's kind of awesome. Basically, China's not a huge fan of getting hitched but you know, she's willing, and then bam! murder.

It's kind of awesome. Her best friend and matron of honor, Ruby, decides they should solve the murder themselves while organizing the last of the wedding. As you do.

The real charm of these stories lies in the sheer amount of detail Albert puts into describing Pecan Springs, TX, in all its glory. And it is glorious. At one point, she pauses after Bayles has just found body #2 to do a one-page digression on Texas geology. Which is fabulous. I learned something!

Now, there was one drawback to the book.





SPOILERPANTS ARE LOOKING SHARP IN SEQUINS, BITCHES. SO SHARP YOU CUT YOURSELF ON THE BIG SEQUINED SPOILERPANTS.








The solution to the mystery ultimately lies in the discovery of a custodial kidnapping, ie a case where one partner kidnaps their own child against court orders. And the way this is laid out is that the mother who has been diligently searching for her daughter for ten years quietly comes into the nursery and quietly lays out her cards, that her daughter is in town and she now needs to approach the custodian and his wife without undue trauma to her child, etc, and China then turns around and basically calls a town conference to announce OMG MELISSA IS A KIDNAP VICTIM AND HER DAD'S THE KIDNAPPER HOLY BACON IF THIS IS TRUE!

Um, as far as I can tell, that's basically the last thing you want someone to do when you're trying to approach a kidnapper who's been sprinting paranoically from city to city to keep your daughter away. So I did sort of feel China needed a slap there. Or better yet, I just wish the concept had been addressed in the text, as in describing the fallout of China's actions, or even the potential fallout so that the book could present the situation in a way that would be educational or god forbid, helpful.

I know! I want helpful with my fiction, even when it gallops merrily past the Bechdel Test with flying colors. I'm incorrigible.

Overall, a good read with some a minor annoyance near the end. I'll definitely keep reading this series. I think there's one with a blue cover over on the shelves somewhere.

Review: Toast Mortem, by Claudia Bishop (2010)

Toast Mortem by Claudia Bishop:

Adela chaired the library board. Just as John Deere bulldozers were good at moving dirt, Adela was good at fund-raising. So the library was a pleasant, well-ordered place with good lighting, lots of books, and up to date computer equipment.

Synopsis: Simply the best culinary mystery I've ever read.

(Snark! Mayhem! Cats! And a computer-savvy kickass librarian!)

I've seen lots of articles puzzling over the popularity of cozy mysteries, those mysteries where the main character is usually a woman employed in a domestic or semi-domestic sphere, who negotiates between that and the world of crime-solving due to unforeseen necessity. And I think I have the answer: these books all* pass the Bechdel test with flying colors. The protagonist usually has a female sidekick with whom she banters back and forth about the crime. If there's a romantic subplot, it takes a backseat to solving the mystery.

And Toast Mortem, in addition to having a really fabulous title (no I can't explain the popularity of puns in cozies) is an outstanding cozy.

The Qwilliam sisters' upstate New York inn is threatened by the establishment of a culinary school right next door, whose famous French chef holds a grudge. In between deflecting his unfunny practical jokes and trying to keep the city council from killing each other, Qwill, the innkeeper, must also find time to raise her son, Jack, put up with air-heads at the front desk, and stop her chef-sister Meg from throwing frying pans at people. And what's the deep dark secret their pastry chef is protecting?

Cue more mayhem.

And it's glorious.

The town of Hemlock Falls is adorably quirky and better yet, well delineated, with the various tangled relationships between the characters adroitly managed. The Qwilliam sisters are fantastic: Qwill, the pragmatic worrier is the perfect foil for her hot tempered and snark-mouthed sister Meg. The front desk airheads are hilarious. Things fall apart in deliciously ghastly ways and the characters respond to situations in ways I could definitely relate to.

Well-written, interesting loopy plot, passes the Bechdel test, and features both placeporn and madcap good times (did I mention I love madcap? I love madcap).

Plus there's a librarian who manages to be neither a bunned spinster** or a flowing-locked sexpot, but an intelligent and savvy individual who's amazingly good at her job. Bonus.

For a culinary mystery, it's not very food-oriented so much as it is kitchen-oriented, as in the focus remains squarely on what it's like to work in a kitchen, making all the food people squee over. The included recipes are kind of terrible, but that's also a plot point, so I'll let it pass.

Strong contender for book of the year.

*A Rose From the Dead passed, but only by the skin of its teeth. I had to go get the book back to check.
**which is fine but come on. Work with stereotypes if you've got 'em

Review: Sprinkle with Murder, by Jenn McKinlay (2010)

Sprinkle with Murder by Jenn McKinlay:

"Mom, is this another ploy of yours to push Tate and me together?"

"Now why would you ask a thing like that?"

"Because two weeks ago, you locked us in the walk-in cooler in the bakery, and we almost froze to death because you thought a near-death experience might bring us to our senses about our feelings for each other. Or does that little episode not ring a bell?"

"I should have left you in for five more minutes."

"Mom!"

Synopsis: The best culinary mystery I nearly didn't read.

Even the recipes rocked.

Now, I really liked this book, even though the first five pages are really, really rough. I mean sanding the door down before painting it rough. The rhythm of the language is very staccato, some of the paragraphs are a little disjointed, and who owns the POV is difficult to establish. Being that I have the attention span of a ferret with a pixy stick, I idly flipped to the back to read the author's blurb. I love author blurbs. They tell you so much: how paranoid an author is about their real identity or other pseudonyms, whether or not they live in the place they're writing about, how seriously they take themselves. And author photos are the bomb. Again with the wealth of information*.

Jenn McKinlay's author blurb begins: "Jenn McKinlay is a dessert freakasaurus. She has been known to eat leftover birthday cake for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and the frozen top tier of her wedding cake didn't stand a chance of seeing its first anniversary."

And I thought, Jenn, I am with you. I will get through your book. And I picked up where I left off.

Which is fortunate, because this book rocks. The characters are well-drawn and interesting, they interact well, they exhibit poor decision-making skills and compassion at the same time, the writing smooths out** and the mystery is mysterious without being overly complicated or draggy.

Childhood pals Angie and Mel open a cupcake bakery in Scottsdale, AZ, with the backing of their other childhood friend, Tate. Hence it's a no-brainer that the bakery will provide cupcakes for Tate's wedding, even if it's to Christie the bridezilla. They send over some samples for her to try, but when she provides no feedback, Mel goes over to her studio and finds the bride totally dead with a cupcake clutched in her talons. Cue the mayhem.

Mel is of course, the primary suspect. This is complicated by her Uncle Stan being on the Scottsdale PD force and Angie's brother Joe being an ADA. Also, her mother painted her bathroom bright orange and the baker across town is hopping mad at being cut out of cupcakes and is stalking the store in a bright pink van. Tate has issues. Angie has issues. Mel's mother has a subscription. Despite all this, at no point does Mel describe herself in terms of extreme narcissistic self-love, and she and Angie keep right on running a bakery while trying to solve the crime and clear Mel's name.

The ending felt a little hm..., but at the same time totally plausible. You really don't know all your neighbors secrets, nor should you.

Will definitely be picking up the sequel.





*For instance, even if you never read Richard Kadrey's Butcher Bird, you should totally check out the author photo. It speaks volumes.
**No, not like the top of a well-frosted cupcake. Give me some credit, I'm not a complete hack.

Review: Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter, by Phoebe Damrosch (2008)

Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter by Phoebe Damrosch:

The gentleman on table twenty-three plans to propose and has arranged for us to deliver a Faberge egg at the end of their meal. Proposals are nerve-racking for everyone involved. While terrified lovers contemplate eternity in sickness, poverty, death, or worse, equally anxious servers imagine ruining what might be the high point of these people's lives together, before the bankruptcy, the Botox, and his affair with the life coach.

Synopsis: Vermont foodie girl in NYC discovers joy of restaurant work, four-star food. Falls in love. Writes good book.

At the start of the book, Damrosch is living in the Williamsburg section of NYC, working at a cafe, pining for her downstairs neighbor and making fun of hipsters. In other words, she's a hipster. This does not make her immediately likeable, but it makes for a vivid and wholistic setting, during which you can settle in and discover that Damrosch really knows how to write.

Then she quits her job (and her downstairs neighbor quits her), moves to a different part of NYC and applies for a job at a new four-star restaurant. But this is no ordinary restaurant. In order to successfully keep her job, Damrosch has to attend all-day courses given by the various chefs and sommeliers, memorize long lists of information about not just food but silverware, table linens and Central Park, and then pass tests on those things, just to serve on the floor.

But here's where it gets interesting: in describing this whole process, Damrosch demonstrates she's the perfect candidate for the job because she's batshit insane for food. All food. Any kind of food. She loves the research, she loves the learning, she loves the eating. And that made the book for me.

It was just like if someone came up to me tomorrow and offered me a job whose requirements were that I had to help people read books, and in order to do that, I had to study books intensely: font-faces, paper weight, binding techniques, ink colors, the Dewey Decimal System, biographies, fiction, genre fiction, new releases, reprints and everything in between. I'd be perfect for that job because I am batshit insane on this one particular subject. That's pretty much what happened to Damrosch with food.

The inner workings of Per Se, the restaurant in question, weren't terribly exciting, but Damrosch is a good writer and keeps you briskly moving with how tightly focused she is on food and oh yeah, there's a love story, which I didn't think I'd like nearly as much as I did, considering I have a cold, black cynical heart. But I really enjoyed it.

It's not a perfect book, by any stretch of the imagination--there's a little too much But What About Me navel-gazing where I was sorely tempted to think, "Oh, look. It's Sex and the Kitchy...en." But I didn't, partly because things never get that bad in the story, but mostly because that pun doesn't work. There's a sort of First World privileged gaze going on that was a little hard to stomach, but that's part and parcel of the sort of dining you start talking about with four-star restaurants. Besides, as Damrosch puts it:

We spent money on two things: food and something we soon named 'everyday luxury'. Under this heading fell things like eight-dollar toothpaste. Yes, toothpaste can be had for a quarter of that, but we decided that if it increased our love of life at least twice a day, it was worth it.

It's a hard attitude to swallow during some portions of the book, but Damrosch at least owns up to her privilege and defends it: this is her crazy. This is who she is. This is equivalent to having a house with more than 5,000 books in it. Everyone has their own priorities.

Overall, it's a better memoir than most, but will really only excite people with a serious bent for food and restaurant reading.

And I'm sure I have a couple books like that around here somewhere.

Review: Town in a Blueberry Jam, by B.B. Haywood (2010)

Town in a Blueberry Jam by B. B. Haywood:

But the fact remained that Sapphire Vine was dead. Someone had killed her. And though Candy found it not only absurd but also literally painful to think that Herr Georg could have plunged a hammer into the back of Sapphire's head (not to mention how painful it must have been for Sapphire herself) the fact remained that he had an excellent motive for doing just that.

Synopsis: Debut of yet another culinary mystery series, this time set on a blueberry farm in Maine, but with bonus "if it weren't for you meddling" middle-aged divorcees speech and deus ex homine handsome.

Does anyone here really investigate their friends and neighbors?

By now I think we are all familiar with the setup: girl with awesome big-city career and husband determines Something's Missing and chucks both items to move back to a smalltown with a family connection and open some type of foodery, where she finds her true calling and oh yeah, a bushel of dead bodies.

Now, if I was the police chief in a small town, I think I'd be watching very carefully to see if any women fitting that description moved in, because they're like the barometer for a murderstorm.

Candy Holliday (please note: everyone in this book has a fairly awesome name. Sapphire Vine, Herr Georg, Judicious F.P. Bosworth, Jock Larson. Work with me.) has moved to a blueberry farm in Cape Willington, Maine with her aging father (Doc...Holliday. See, I told you.) and that right there would be your cue for a homicidal maniac to take over the town. Aging playboy Jock Larson falls suspiciously over a cliff! Gossip columnist Sapphire Vine is blunt-trauma'd in the back of the head! And our girl Candy's immediately on the case.

Lo does she investigate. She investigates so much and so well, in fact, that the police chief of Cape Willington goes from being horrified by her actions (breaking into a crime scene and yoinking key evidence, for a start) to offering her a job at the end of the book. And frankly, I cannot tell you the number of times that has happened to me.

Now, despite all the piss-taking in this review, I do have to say: this is a pretty fun book. It's easy and sunny and likeable. Candy is not wholly terrible and not wholly likeable. Her motivations are sometimes murky, and she's kind of officious and awkward at times, making her both complicated and interesting.

She has a best friend/sidekick who basically steals the book with her one-liners and her sass and her random tearing-aboutness, and I kind of want the two of them to scandalize their town by getting together like the women in Jae's Second Nature but without the werewolf thing.

There were, however, two things that got up my nose.

(Only two, you ask? I know. I feel like I am growing as person.)

Thing the First: There seems to be a terrible trope in these books where the author takes a moment for the heroine to describe herself in detail. And the details are always glowing and the heroine always looks way better than any mortal has a right to look. To wit:

The sun had added some color to her high, full cheekbones this summer and a touch of rosemary honey to the tips of her hair. It contrasted nicely with her eyes, which were a light shade of blue but bright--"the color of forget-me-nots in spring" her mother used to say.

Okay, am I the only person who has never thought of their hair in terms of whether it looks like it's been dipped in honey or not?

Dear authors,

Please stop doing that.

Thank you.

Thing the Second: During the book's thrilling conclusion (which I am not going to spoil for you because it was both thrilling and kind of kick-ass) there's a moment where you think that Candy and her sidekick are about to be saved by the town's Awesomely Handsome Man. They are not, in fact, which is fantastic, but then afterwards they both make a point of going up to said man and cooing at him repeatedly how wonderful it was that he saved them. Um, no. No. That is twaddle on a particularly poky stick. I do not want that.

Overall, though, the book's a darn good read, and I'll definitely be stalking the library for the second in the series, Town in a Lobster Stew.