You all know that the famed Underground Railroad back in slave days wasn’t really a railroad, right? No train cars, no tracks? If that’s how you understood it, you are correct . In Colson Whitehead’s novel, The Underground Railroad, his heroine Cora heads north, speeding on train cars in deep-dug tunnels. This lends a fantasy feel to the book. I hoped for something closer to [...]
When you open the pages of Susan Meissner’s Fall of Marigolds, you will find yourself reading a double story. It begins with Taryn on the 10-year anniversary of her widowhood; her husband perished in the South Tower on 9/11. She had just read the plus sign of her pregnancy test that morning. She planned to meet him and tell him the news. Now, ten [...]
Woo-hoo! We Mormons are getting a new hymnbook! We interrupt our usual fare of book reviews and recipes to celebrate this event and offer our top 10 count-down for songs to add. We have borrowed liberally from our Protestant neighbors' hymnbooks because those folks know to fill their great and spacious churches with a joyful sound. Ready? Let's go! #10: [...]
Meet the rural housewife, circa 1918. We’ll call her Mary. Even two generations removed from her pioneer foremothers, she might live in what is best described as Log Cabin 2.0 with a half dozen stairstep children. Her husband might add more rooms as another half dozen children come along. Life for the Marys was “hard, endless, dirty labor.” Dinnertime came from chickens the women [...]
January 6, 2018 This one’s gonna be a rant. It’s only the first week in January and I’m already quaking with a bad case of cabin fever. Four days buttoned up inside my house, wearing no make-up, and I’m rattling the bars. I could have gone out. We just endured a year of unemployment. We got through it by Ignoring Problems. Now that the [...]
I own one single, round cookie cutter and I'm happy. One and done. You, however, might be the kind of cookie baker that buys them by the barrel. You've got leaves, pumpkins, Christmas trees, stars, gingerbread men, hearts. But do you have snowflakes? The cookies might be a little hard to frost, unless you're handy with a pastry bag. But I'll bet cookie lovers [...]
In the comic novel, The Fattest Mormon, by Tyson Abaroa, lovable loser Phil Carroll travels the country in his Winnebago, entering contests and living off the prize money. The novel gets off to a rough start with a comic bit about granny who drives like a bad stock car racer. But by the time Phil and his ‘Bago pull into tiny Taylor, Arizona, to [...]
I steered my car down a random twisty road. I saw a random antique shop and decided to stop. Inside, I walked up to a random book shelf and pulled off a random cookbook. Funny thing, but the pictures looked familiar. I had seen that wedding cake. And that soup tureen. And that tween girl, plating the spaghetti and meatballs she had just cooked [...]
I’ll be the first to admit I’m no expert on PTSD. But I suspect Roxane Gay, author of An Untamed State, knows only slightly more than I do. In Untamed, Mireille Duval Jameson is kidnapped by resentful thugs. Miri’s Haitian father made good as a civil engineer in the U.S. Now he’s back in Haiti, where his wealth sticks out like a whale on [...]
This is a cookie for the indecisive sugar fiend. When you visit the recipe site, you will find a more beautiful sample of the finished product. I used a rather large cookie scoop, and cookies that big take 17 minutes to bake! As for the review of the extra-large book that I know you're all waiting on, I can report that I passed [...]
