A Review of "Life at the Dumpling" by Trisha Cole

 

Despite the obvious misery of the pandemic, if you had the luck, privilege, and health to make it through, it also provided opportunity. It forced us to slow, to focus on how our houses must be homes. It opened up the hours to do what we never allowed ourselves the time to do, whether bake bread (put the pan in pandemic?) or engage our arts-and-craftsy sides we tend to under-prioritize in a world of pressing deadlines.

In Trisha Cole’s case, it gave her time to crank out a family and friends newsletter, typed and handwritten and illustrated in a charming way that will create warm feelings of nostalgia for those of us who still pore over falling apart copies of the Moosewood Cookbook. Which is only fitting, as the newsletters offered recipes, poems, encouraging quotes, word search games, fashion tips from Cole’s teen girls, and more. And now the book Life at the Dumpling compiles the first 20 newsletters, originally penned and shipped from March 2020 to March 2023.

Care to read the rest then do at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on October 24, 2024.

A Review of "The Glutton" by A.K. Blakemore

 

How unreasonable, the Age of Reason, especially for an illiterate—if wildly, imaginatively thoughtful—peasant. A.K. Blakemore’s new novel The Glutton might be based on a wisp of a fantastical, 18th-century real person, but widens into a shocking fairy tale as vivid as a Breughel or Bosch. 

 Here’s how the book’s beyond an anti-hero protagonist introduces himself, “The Great Tarare. The Glutton of Lyon. The Hercules of the Gullet. The Bottomless Man. The Beast.” Indeed, as Tarare relates his life of woe-on-the-go to his hospital nurse Sister Perpetué, we learn of his hardscrabble upbringing not shy of maternal care, a shocking, near-death beating keyed to a betrayal after his first kiss, and a life with a band of con men, courtesans, and schemers who have no problem using his disgusting hunger as the main act of their traveling sideshow.

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on November 8, 2024