About book Blood, Bones, And Butter: The Inadvertent Education Of A Reluctant Chef (2011)
I loved the first 80% of this book, considering it among one of the best I've read in the last few months. It's not just about food (although that is a theme), it's really about the author's quirky childhood and turbulent adolescence and young adulthood. She's honest, smart, vulnerable, and perceptive. It was great. Then came the last 20%, where she talks about her marriage. Suddenly she seemed to get stuck in a whiny rut of literary wallowing in her questionable choices. The memoir got stuck in her unsatisfying marriage just as she herself did. Read it anyway, but if you start to get bored at the end, just put it down. You've already read the best parts. If my rating system weren't so stingy, this would get 4 stars from me. It was a real trip to hear Gabrielle narrate her life.BB&B was our f2f book club choice for December, 2014. We originally were to have our holiday party at her father's restaurant in New Hope, PA. Well, it was not open and serving at the time we needed. Warning -- there are "spoilers" in the following.But, I did very much enjoy listening to this book, narrated by the author herself. She is a piece of work -- a woman with the high voltage energy necessary to create a successful restaurant in NYC. She takes the reader on a ride through her life, from her family's cookouts on the shores of the Delaware River; to the family shattering chaos of her parents' divorce; to her personal strike-out for independence by earning her own pay as a dishwasher in a local cafe; to escaping serious accusations of under-the-counter waitress shenanigans largely because she was underage in the first place, so placing charges became problematic for the accusers; to her travels in Europe and forays into education as a writer; to her outrageous risk and success in creating the Prune, a restaurant in NYC; to her marriage, at least partly so her now husband would have legal status to continue his Ph.D. level research and teaching; to her love of the substitute family she found in summers in Italy cooking alongside her 80+ year old mother-in-law; to bearing and raising two children even as she and her husband often maintained separate living quarters in NYC; to crawling out on oleander trees on her last trip (?) to Italy to clear the branches so the sea could be seen while sitting, rather than standing, on the veranda; to the perhaps inevitable collapse of her marriage.
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No real "plot" but still an entertaining read
—sree
Beautiful,raw memoir. Loved every minute!
—kimber286
