Book Review: The Mother Daughter Cookbook by Lynette Rohrer Shirk

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My daughters are ecstatic because school got called for another snow day here in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon. They’ve been off all week, and now they have two more weeks off to look forward to. I, on the other hand, am going a little stir crazy. I haven’t been out of my neighborhood since Sunday, since we have one four-wheel drive car that will take us around and my husband is using it to go to work.

Today I think I’ll have to get out and walk. There’s a Starbucks Coffee about a 1/2 hour walk away, and a nice hot cocoa sounds like a good reward at the end of it. Maybe all three of us can venture out together.

Then I’d like to come back home and bake something from The Mother Daughter Cookbook. I recently got this book to review, and this will be the first recipe I try from it. I’ve got my mind set on making Gingerbread Cream Cheese Cupcakes. There’s a substitution for chocolate frosting listed with the recipe, and I may just have to frost half the cupcakes with that. Yum!

The Mother Daughter Cookbook looks like a great addition to any mom’s cookbook shelf. The author, Lynette Rohrer Shirk, has put together an interesting collection of recipes and broken them down into tasks for the mom and tasks for the daughter. In my case, my daughters are older and they can do any of the tasks, but I think they’ll like taking on the daughter’s side of the recipe anyway.

The recipes are also punctuated with quotes and cooking tidbits that make for interesting reading as well. There are a lot of recipes I’m looking forward to trying in this cookbook. And I think it would make a good gift for any mother and daughter team. You could also use this at a mother-daughter book club meeting, and have the girls work their part of the recipe while the moms collaborate with theirs. What fun!

I’ll keep you posted when we get to taste the cupcakes.

Book review: Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss

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I’ve loved every Molly Gloss book I’ve read, and Hearts of Horses proved no exception.  Here’s my review:

It’s 1917 in rural Oregon, and many of the local men are away in France fighting. Into this scene rides Martha Lessen, a girl of 19 who says she can break horses to saddle. With fewer men around to perform the same job, Martha finds success first by hiring on at the Bliss ranch, then by expanding out to other ranches in the county. Eventually setting up a circuit training, where she rides horses from one corral to the next rotating where a horse spends the night, Martha works hard to gain the respect of the horses and the people in the area.

The tale unfolds slowly, giving the reader time to get to know the characters the way Martha gets to know them as well as her horses, one incident at a time. And the story is firmly rooted in it’s time period. There’s anti-German sentiment directed against ranchers of German descent, even though they were born in this country. There’s sacrifice for the war effort, and there’s loss from the war too. The cast of characters are a mix of good and bad, which you would expect to find in just about any place you settle for a while. As Martha’s confidence in her abilities grow, so do her connections to people in the county.

As in her other books, The Jump Off Creek and Wild Life, Gloss brings the American west in its first decades of settlement to life. Her storytelling is rich in details, and she knows what motivates and moves her characters. Her female characters are strong, often bucking expectations for women of their time while remaining true to themselves. I recommend it for mother-daughter book clubs with girls in 8th grade and up.

Book Review: Much Ado About Anne by Heather Vogel Frederick

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Heather Vogel Frederick continues her delightful mother-daughter book club series with Much Ado About Anne. This time the book club is reading the Anne of Green Gables series, and the girls are totally committed to their book club and to each other when the new reading year starts for their group. There are new challenges—can the moms really have invited Calliope and Becca Chadwick into their book club without asking the girls?—and new events arise that test their friendship in ways they don’t expect. But Frederick does a great job of continuing the saga and bringing us even more into the lives of these book club members that readers grew to know and love in her first book in the series, The Mother-Daughter Book Club.

The historic town of Concord, Mass., where Frederick herself group up, is once again a prominent feature in the story. So is Lucy Maud Montgomery, who wrote the Anne of Green Gables books. Frederick weaves facts about the classical author into the story seamlessly and helps readers learn about another classic series in the process.

You’ll worry with Jess about losing her family’s historic farm, cheer for Emma as she grows more confident, worry for Cassie as she struggles to accept her mom’s new boyfriend, and stress right along with Megan as she crunches to design clothes for her fashion show. And they all experience a few blips in their friendship in ways that will ring true for girls in upper elementary and middle school.

Much Ado About Anne will most certainly satisfy readers of the series while leaving them happily anticipating the next book up.

Book Review: Love, Meg by C. Leigh Purtill

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Meg believes she knows everything about her life. Her parents are dead and her older sister, Lucy, has cared for her ever since she was a baby. They travel from town to town in California, following Lucy’s jobs and boyfriends. Meg has learned to be self-sufficient since she was very young, because Lucy is overwhelmed providing for the two of them on her own.

For years she has turned to Jennifer Aniston—the actress from friends—for emotional support, writing her letters detailing the difficulties she faces in school and at home. Jen has always written back with great advice and sometimes even gifts to help Meg through rough situations. When Meg starts another new school to go with a new apartment that follows Lucy’s new boyfriend, she thinks her life will continue to follow this pattern for years to come.

Then a man shows up at the apartment Meg shares with Lucy claiming to be her uncle from New York. He talks about a family back east that she knows nothing about, and tries to convince Lucy to go there. Suddenly, everything Meg thinks she knows about her life changes, and when Lucy refuses to reconnect with her family, Meg sets off without her. Moving to New York becomes a journey of self-discovery as well as a way to get to know the family she never had.

What she finds is not what she expects, but she discovers a lot about herself and the true meaning of family along the way.

Love, Meg by C. Leigh Purtill looks at what it means to be a mother, a daughter, a grandmother, and all the ways that family can support us as well as tear us down. I recommend it for mother-daughter book clubs with girls 12 and older.

Book Review: Cleavage: Breakaway Fiction for Real Girls Edited by Deb Loughead and Jocelyn Shipley

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Cleavage: Breakaway Fiction for Real Girls. Just the name is edgy and designed to get our attention, and the stories inside live up to the title. In the foreword, editors Deb Loughead and Jocelyn Shipley say that the word cleavage has many meanings. There’s the image of the valley between breasts of course, but cleavage also refers to the division of a fertilized ovum from a single cell into a mass of smaller cells. It’s what they call the mom factor that shows up in the book. Cleavage also has contradictory meanings. On one hand it means to break away from, on the other it means to hold tightly to.

You’ll find stories relating to all the meanings in this delightful book of short stories that’s easy to digest and gives a lot to think and talk about. If you can think of an issue for women, it’s probably covered, including attitudes about weight, breast implants, tattoos, body image, make-up, clothes and more. These pieces will open the door for moms and daughters to talk about hard-to-bring up subjects that benefit from open discussion.

A short bio of each author, including a note about what inspired her to write her story, is a nice touch that adds extra meaning to each piece. Mother-daughter book clubs with high-school-aged girls will find a lot to like when reading Cleavage.

Reasons to Read

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Last night I attended a meeting of the Willamette Writers, where my friend and mentor Christina Katz was speaking about building a writing platform. Christina has written two excellent books for writers—Writer Mama, How to Raise a Writing Career Alongside Your Kids, and Get Known Before the Book Deal: Use Your Personal Strengths to Grow an Author Platform. During her talk, Christina read a list of all the reasons she could find that people may want to write. That got me to thinking about all the reasons people may want to read. Here’s what I came up with. It’s a puny list to be sure, so I look forward to reading comments from readers who tell me more.

Reasons to Read:

  • To learn something new
  • To remember something forgotten
  • To relax
  • To laugh
  • To be enlightened
  • To gain perspective
  • To be entertained
  • To get motivated
  • To get sleepy
  • To be stimulated
  • To learn how to do something
  • To pass the time
  • To avoid housework
  • To gain insight
  • To indulge yourself

What’s your reason?

Book Review: Memo to the President Elect by Madeleine Albright

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When I’m not reading for one of my mother-daughter book clubs or reviewing books for this blog and my Web site, I’m reading for a book discussion group that I’m in with my husband, Randy, and three other couples. Our group mostly reads nonfiction, and tomorrow night we’re meeting to talk about Memo to the President Elect: How We Can Restore America’s Reputation and Leadership by Madeleine Albright.

Because Albright wrote the book before she even knew who the major party nominee’s would be, she’s writing to a speculative winner that could have been Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain or Mitt Romney, among others. Albright frequently references campaign promises, and it’s apparent that any of the candidates could have made the promises she recounts. It’s interesting to see that no matter how far apart their stated views are, the same words can be used to define separate stances.

What I really like about the book is that it focuses on foreign policy. Albright goes throughout the regions of the world and talks about the history of each one as well as the current status. As you might expect, she has a lot of praise for President Clinton’s policies and harsh criticism for President Bush’s, but she both praised and criticized past presidents regardless of which political party they were part of.

Whether you agree with Albright or not, you may find this to be an interesting look at the world and our part in it. It made me think of foreign policy as a long continuum, not just isolated events that occur to get our attention. I expect our discussion tomorrow night will be very interesting.

Book Review: Unraveling by Lynn Biederman and Michelle Baldini

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unravelingPreviously I’ve written about an interview with Lynn Biederman, author of unraveling, and her mom. But I realized I never wrote my official review of the book for my blog readers. So here it is, just in time for you to pick up and read while school’s out for Thanksgiving.

unraveling by Lynn Biederman and Michelle Baldini

Amanda Himmelfarb is starting high school and is ready to grab all she can of it. She wants to leave behind the loser image that got her the one-time nickname of Himmelfart. She’s contemplating having sex with a boy she met on vacation the year before. And she’s constantly at odds with her mother, who watches her like a hawk and comes down hard on her for all the things she imagines Amanda wants to do. The reader aches for everyone involved in the dysfunctional dynamics of this family: the mother-daughter pair who are constantly at odds, the mom and dad who argue over discipline and trust, the younger sister who takes advantage of it all to gain special privileges for herself. In short, everyone is unraveling, and the more threads that get pulled away, the faster the foundation continues to crumble. Just when everyone seems on the brink of coming apart, a surprising event helps them start to put the stitches of their lives back together.

Members of mother-daughter book clubs will find unraveling by Lynn Biederman and Michelle Baldini a safe place to discuss mother-daughter conflicts and look at how they affect the whole family. So much of the conflict comes about through misunderstanding and miscommunication, it’s a primer on what not to say or do if you want to maintain good relationships between parents and children. There’s also lots to talk about, particularly on the topic of girls who feel unloved and unaccepted may be less able to set acceptable boundaries for all areas of their lives.

If you’d like to check out the interview, here’s the link to Good News Broadcast.

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