Book Review

Wall Carolyn, Sweeping up Glass. New York : Random House, 2009.

Olivia Harker Cross lives in the mountains of Kentucky during the time of the great depression with her elderly and insane mother and her young grandson, abandoned by a mother with dreams of “making it” in California. Olivia has not had an easy life. She lost her beloved Pap at an early age and has been left with her mother Ida who is crazy and abusive. Furthermore her life has been marred by extreme poverty especially since the impoverished residents of her community have not been able to pay for items from the store she runs nor for the “doctoring services” provided by her Pap to local animals. Olivia also has dangerous enemies who are making life treacherous for her and now her enemies are killing her beloved wolves.

Carolyn Wall writes Olivia's story in a fast paced and engaging way which is tinged with mystery. Her style is reminiscent of other Southern writers such as Harper Lee and Dorothy Allison. This book was an engaging read and I would highly recommend it.

Book Review

Hopgood, Mei Ling. Lucky Girl: a Memoir. Chapel Hill, Algonquin Books, 2009.

In 1974 Mei Ling Hopgood was adopted from Taiwan by Rollie and Chris Hopgood in what was to be one of the first international adoptions. After about seven months of bureaucratic red tape, Mei Ling was finally able to join her American family. Growing up in Taylor Michigan ( a suburb of Detroit) with parents whom she loved and who loved her dearly and with two younger brothers who were adopted from Korea, Mei Ling lived an all American girlhood and barely gave a though to the family who gave her up. But her birth family showed up out of the blue wanting to meet her and would not take no for an answer.

Her birth family turned out to be a middle class family of Chinese ancestry living in Taipei, defying Mei Lings expectations of a poor peasant family living in the country. Along the way she also met her sister Irene Hoffmann, also given up at birth by their birth parents to a couple from Switzerland.

Mei Lings memoir deals sensitively with the conflicting emotions she has felt about meeting a family who is so different culturally from her in ways she can't ignore. She also deals with how she felt growing up in the seventies near Detroit as one of the few people of Asian descent and facing barely disguised anti Asian discrimination while at the same time considering herself to be fully American.

This was a wonderful book which was hard to put down. I would highly recommend it.

Book Review

Mintle, Linda Dr. Press Pause Before You Eat. Howard Books : New York, 2009.

I will begin by saying that Dr. Mintle is a well known author of Christian self help books. I did not know this before reading the book and mention it only because this book will not speak as well to a non-Christian audience. Indeed many Librarything reviewers were suspicious of this book because it was Christian.

That being said, the topic of this book (mindless eating) is a timely one which affects so many of us. Her book is very conversational and includes many anecdotes from her personal life and from the lives of her friends and the patients she encountered in her years as an eating disorders specialist. Dr. Mintle is very knowledgeable and her suggestions are very sound. Her book was very easy to read because of her conversational tone. I have struggled a lot myself with mindless and emotional eating and I definitely recognized myself in many of her stories. I also learned some tricks that might help me in my own struggles with weight. I also found her use of scripture to be very insightful and inspiring and not at all heavy handed.

I would recommend this book to anyone who wants a Christian perspective on overcoming struggles with emotional and mindless overeating.

Book Review Levine, James A. The Blue Notebook. New York : Spiegel & Grau, 2009

I have two small children. Needless to say it has been a very long time since I have sat down with a book and obsessively read it until I was finished. The Blue Notebook is the book that ended a seven year streak. I started reading at 6:30 and did not (as much as possible) put it down until I was done somewhat after midnight.

The Blue Notebook is the fictional diary of the precocious and imaginative 15 year old Batuk Rasmadeen who was sold into sexual slavery by her father at the age of nine. Although Dr. Levine is a middle aged British doctor living in Minnesota, he is able to convincingly portray the interior mind of a young female prostitute living and working at Mumbai's notorious “street of cages”.

His portrayal is of a young girl who is secretly horrified by the circumstances she finds herself in, yet learns to internalize this, because she quickly learns that working is the only way to survive in the life in which she finds herself. Literate in a society where many are not, she knows that she is capable of much more than her narrow circumstances allow, but she is she is treated as a pariah by her “betters” in Mumbais's constrained society. Due to her imagination and ability to write she is able to have an escape of sorts but there are to be no happy endings for Batuk.

I would recommend this book wholeheartedly. It is beautifully written and shines much needed light on a persistent global crisis.

Book Review - Ready, Steady, Spaghetti

I will start my review by saying that my daughter (6 1/2) loves to cook and loves to browse for recipes. She collects cookbooks and sometimes even steals my cookbooks and cooking magazines. Needless so say, I was excited to receive yet another cookbook to add to her collection, and I was very interested to see what she thought of it.

My daughter is a huge fan of the Annabel Karmel cookbooks and already has a couple of those, so I was on some level comparing this recipe book to the ones that she has. We flipped through the cookbook together. A small number of the recipes were definite must tries, a few were definite never tries (chicken noodle omelet?) and there were a few old standbys the appear in just about every cookbook imaginable. (scrambled eggs, anyone?) Not that I have anything against recipes for scrambled eggs in a children's cookbook. However I haven't noticed scrambled eggs necessarily being a real hit in my household and I liked the idea in one of our other cookbooks of making a "sun" out of pieces of toast surrounding the scrambled eggs and calling them "sunny eggs", which turned plain old scrambled eggs and whole wheat toast into a feast for the eyes, so to speak.

An issue I had with the book is that safety was not emphasized enough. I understand that 6 is not the age group that this book is aimed at, but even for eight and nine year old's, it would still be a good idea to emphasize the need for adult supervision.

In short the book had beautiful pictures which to my mind had more of a visual appeal to adults than to children, some interesting recipes (the coconut ice was delicious and easy). What it lacked for children was more visual appeal geared towards a child's taste and more frequent warnings about food safety, and what it lacked from an adult perspective was more recipes designed to make healthy foods more appealing to the fussy eaters in their lives. (And please no recipes for hummus, you will not gets beans into either my daughter or her 4 year old brother so don't even try.)

In conclusion, I would say that even though I initially wondered whether my daughter would ever give this book back to me so I could actually look at it, but in the end she lost interest in it pretty quickly. (By contrast I'm still waiting for my "Taste of Home" Halloween special and would really like it back please.....)