The School of Essential Ingredients

The owner and head chef of a restaurant by the same name, Lillian teaches a cooking class to a small group of students once a month on Monday nights. Calling her class “The School of Essential Ingredients,” Lillian looks to impart her particular cooking method to her class, a technique that has little use for recipes and instead relies on each person’s understanding and feeling of every necessary ingredient. Lillian taught herself how to cook as she made meals for herself and her mother, eventually using food to draw her mother out of her book-lined shell. Taking her knowledge of the chemistry between food and human emotion, Lillian imperceptibly teaches her students how food can affect their lives and mend relationships. Each chapter delves into the life of a member of the cooking class, revealing the reason they are there and what life is like at home. As the students become more familiar with each other in class, their lives start blending together, intersecting after class and beyond. Food and the pleasure it brings heals several people’s wounds and makes this group of strangers close friends, roommates, and lovers.

It’s hard to describe a novel like this that is so subtle, and where the pieces fit together so perfectly but so seamlessly, it’s difficult to identify the initial components. The writing in this firs t novel is so smooth, it really could have been about anything and it would have been a good book. Bauermeister has a gift for writing about food, and I wonder if it spreads to other topics as well. The metaphors and similes she uses are so poetic, she has you rereading phrases just to capture them in your head forever. I can see myself reading this over and over again. Although this is not magical realism, the food descriptions remind me of Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel. Recommended to me by a coworker who loved it so much her husband read it and loved it too, The School of Essential Ingredients is an appetizing delight.

The Beach Street Knitting Society and Yarn Club

Don't you just want to dive into this cover?

Imagine your husband confessing to an affair and saying he wants a divorce, only to die in an automobile accident hours later. How would you deal? Instead of wallowing in her pain and confusion, Jo Mackenzie knows that in order to support herself and her two little boys, Jack and Archie, she must take them from their London home and buy her grandmother’s yarn shop in a small seaside town. Jo soon finds herself amidst a less than perfect house, two rambunctious young men, a store that needs updating, and the eternal question of what to have for dinner. First tackling the shop, Jo makes much needed changes such as new window displays, yarn reorganization, launching a successful Stitch and Bitch group, and even a new name, much to the dismay of the shop’s longtime assistant. Settling into town, Jo quickly makes friends with her neighbors and the new owners of the town pub, and stands up to the schoolyard queen, the head of the PTO. But among all the hustle and bustle of their new lives, Jo and her boys endure countless heartbreaking moments when they remember the husband and father they lost. Originally entitled Divas Don't Knit, the novel was renamed for distribution in the USA. Perfect for fans of The Friday Night Knitting Group, all who like mom lit and British chick lit will adore this book.

McNeil has already written a sequel called Needles and Pearls, which will hopefully be distributed here soon. Check out her website at http://www.mcknits.co.uk/, which includes some patterns from the book.

Having recently read a few books where the husband dies, I was expecting a heavy-handed treatment regarding Jo's grief process. I was happily disappointed, for McNeil addresses some of the issues but doesn't dwell on them. Most of the time, the reader can almost forget there was even a major tragedy in Jo's life, and that made the book more enjoyable and relaxing.

In the book, Grace hires Jo to finish all her knitted pieces, in addition to being her on-call knitting coach. I really wish I could just knit and leave the troubling seaming to someone else. That would make me a much more productive knitter.