Julia Glass: The Whole World Over

Greenie is relatively happy in her New York life, with four-year-old son George, and psychotherapist husband Alan, except that the latter seems distant lately, and even the fact that her bakery business is going really well, doesn’t deflect the sadness that they don’t seem to talk any more.

When the larger-than-life governor of New Mexico invites her to audition to be his personal chef, and then to actually take the job, Greenie decides to go for it, hoping the change of pace will help her family. She and George have a lovely summer together, but she and Alan grow ever more emotionally distant with that many miles between them, and when a childhood flame turns up at the governor’s ranch, she tumbles into an affair.

Filled with interesting characters both in New Mexico and Manhattan, this book is the story of a year in one woman’s life, and that of all her friends, a year that culminates, not with the turning of the calendar pages, but the destruction of the twin towers – for it’s the events of 9/11/01 that finally cause Greenie and Alan to move back toward togetherness.

An easy, comfortable book with three-dimensional characters.

Louise Fitzhugh

Harriet the Spy is the reason I became a writer. Well, not entirely, but she’s the fictional sister of my soul. With her ratty jeans and tool belt full of spy stuff, her endless number of notebooks, and her love of observation, she snuck into my life when I was eight or ten years old, and lingered thereafter.

I had occasion to re-read this book in late November, because I bought two copies of it, one to replace my own, lost years ago, and the other to send to a stranger as part of a book exchange. (Adults were to share their favorite children’s books).

Even though the book is short, and the language is juvenile, I still love the characters and the story. I credit Harriet for my recent habit of wearing belts again.

Linda Greenlaw

Made famous by Sebastian Junger’s book The Perfect Storm, and the movie that followed, Linda Greenlaw was the captain of the Hannah Boden, a swordboat out of Gloucester, MA. In this book, her first, though I read her others long ago, and only just finished this one, she tells the story of a typical month aboard her ship, and explains how swordfishing really works.

As much a story of the sea, as it is a story about the people who work as commercial fishermen, this book is vivid and engaging, with equal amounts of action and humor, the latter most often represented by Greenlaw’s own dry wit. At times, I could feel the waves, and smell the salt air, so good was she and drawing her readers in.

I’m looking forward to re-reading her other work, just for more of her voice, and the flavor of her life, and I hope she continues to write.

Judith Ryan Hendricks

Hendricks’ second book is a departure from the cozy Seattle she wrote about in Bread Alone, and returned to in The Baker’s Apprentice. This time, the setting is New Mexico, primarily in and around Santa Fe, and instead of bread, the main themes are art, herbs, and family.

Avery James, raised in an orphanage with only an embroidered t-shirt as a memento of the family she never knew, comes face to face with a painting of her mother while working as a caterer for a prominent artist. He befriends her, and offers to tell her about her mother, who died several years before, and she grudgingly accepts the offer. Swirling around the pair are rumors, old lovers, and a collection of old Mexican women who took Avery off the streets, and gave her a home, and their knowledge of herbs.

Like Bread Alone, Isabel’s Daughter paints vivid pictures of both people and food, but unlike Hendrick’s first book, this one’s ending is somewhat more bitter than sweet.

Judith Ryan Hendricks

I was first introduced to Ms. Hendricks’ work through the novel Bread Alone, which I mostly read in a single night in a hotel in L.A. that had an extremely uncomfortable mattress. That book was warm and funny, and when I finished it, I was inspired to bake bread for the first time in years, so when I discovered that a sequel was published this year, I immediately added it to my amazon wishlist, and then ordered it when I spent the birthday gift certificates I’d amassed.

I regret to confess – I’m disapponted in the sequel. The Baker’s Apprentice lives up to all those negative stereotypes of second novels (though it’s actually her third), and while the old familiar characters – Wynter who fled her cheating husband in L.A. and moved to Seattle to bake bread, her friend and sometime roomate, the dancer CM, young blue-haired art school dropout and cake decorator, Tyler, andMac the bartender/novelist who wins Wynter’s heart – are all there, they seem pale shadows of their earlier selves, and instead of coming away from this book feeling cozy and wanting to sip coffee and smell bread baking, I feel cold and sort of hollow and unsatisfied.

If Bread Alone was a perfectly flakey croissant with sweet cream butter and bitter dark marmalade, The Baker’s Apprentice is Wonder bread – bland, spongey, and utterly lacking in color.

Joanne Fluke

Hannah Swenson owns a bakery called The Cookie Jar in a fictional town in Minnesota, and when she’s not pushing sugar, she solves crimes. The formula for a Culinary Mystery is not new: cozy murder mystery combined with a cookbook, but unlike Diane Mott Davidson’s tales, the mystery here is predictable, and the text is desperate for a good editor.

I confess that the book did inspire the need to make cobbler (mine was strawberry), and the recipe worked, for the most part, but I find it jarring to have the recipes within the chapters, and not grouped together at the end.