Gumbo Tales - Sara Roahen

I have never been to New Orleans.  The boyfriend has, and he dubbed it the worst place he's ever been.  That said, it's hard to believe after reading Sara Roahen's delightful Gumbo Tales.  Focused on New Orleans food and the struggle to fit in as a transplant to the city, Roahen divides her book into chapters that each focus on a dish or beverage and a theme that goes along with it.  For example, the chapter about Sazeracs focuses on parallels between New Orleans and Roahen's native Wisconsin as well as the evolution of the cocktail.  The history of all the dishes are dug into, though for most of them there's a lot of ambiguity about how the food really came to be, such New Orleans hosts such a mish-mash of peoples and always has.

Roahen clearly started writing this book pre-Katrina, which leads to an odd and heartbreaking duality.  She has a lot of nostalgia for the city "before the storm" and a lot of heartbreak for how it's suffered "after the storm," as the history of New Orleans has become divided, but there's also a lot of hope there, too.  She notes which restaurants and stands have closed their doors, seemingly never to return, but also the ones that have opened again stronger than ever, or the ones that aren't open yet but show signs of life, slowly stirring.  Even the rebuilding of the city's Vietnamese community is touched upon, with the revival of the street market and the Tet festival.  Carnival is described, both pre- and post-Katrina, in a way that most who are not native to New Orleans could possibly imagine.

But of course, this is primarily a book about food, and Roahen's descriptions are tantalizing.  She manages to make foods that I would likely never try, like tripe and turkey necks, sound delicious.  The only dish that even she couldn't make me crave was fertilized eggs--yes, eggs that actually have chicks in them.  That one brought up a shudder, but aside from that, I think every single thing she mentioned sounded delicious.  And it was educational, too!  She clearly did a lot of research here, citing various books from various time periods as part of her research into the evolution of New Orleans cuisines (including Cajun, Creole, Vietnamese, and all sort of hybrids and others that pop up here and there) and some of them seem like they could be great reading on their own.  Additionally, she provides a lot of insight into how some of the dishes are actually prepared, in their many preparations--something that she learned as someone trying to cook New Orleans style.  For example, I'd never known that the color of a roux affected a gumbo so much!  Or that so many different types of meat were supposed to go into red beans and rice!  This book has definitely inspired me to try some more New Orleans-style recipes, though I can't by any stretch call myself a New Orleansian.

Overall, this is another great addition to my trove of food books.  I don't think it's something I'd go back and read again and again, but I definitely made some mental notes about things to look into further, and it was certainly an enjoyable read.

4 stars out of 5.

Anna and the French Kiss - Stephanie Perkins (Anna and the French Kiss #1)

So, one of the categories for the Popsugar Reading Challenge for 2017 is to listen to an audiobook.  Originally I'd slated The Nightingale for this, since it's supposed to be a great audiobook.  But then I figured that, given my attention span with listening to things, I'd better pick out something I'd actually read, so that when I inevitably tuned out, I could catch up without constantly having to rewind.  So, because of that and library availability, I got Anna and the French Kiss on audiobook.

I liked Anna a lot less on audio than I did when I read it.  Part of this is the narrator.  I don't think it's really the narrator's fault, but she reads in this high, breathy voice that kind of made me want to punch Anna (not the narrator herself, let's be clear) in the face because she came off so much more brainless and immature and downright bitchy than she did in the actual book.  I didn't agree with the inflections she used and felt that it gave a completely different feel to the entire story; if I'd listened to this originally, never in a million years would I have picked up the two companion books, Lola and the Boy Next Door and Isla and the Happily Ever After.

But hearing the book did bring to light a few things that I think I glossed over the times that I read it.  Like how there's a surprising amount of slut-shaming and homophobia in this book, and not all of it is from the antagonists; there's actually a good deal from Anna herself, which makes me flinch away from the book as a whole.  There's an incident in which the stereotypical "bitchy" girl calls one of Anna's friends a dyke, and Anna gets into a fight with her.  Anna is so offended that this term was used, not because it's a derogatory term, but because the friend isn't a lesbian, so how dare someone imply that she is?  Later she backtracks some and tries to say that the insult doesn't make any sense, but her knee-jerk reaction is that, somehow, being a lesbian was the insult here, not the way in which it was referred to.  She doesn't show this attitude toward a man who's implied to be gay at another point in the book; rather, this seems to be confined to lesbianism, which makes the whole thing so icky.

And then there's the slut-shaming.  This is rampant from all directions.  Someone spreads a rumor that Anna slept with the guy she was dating, which of course automatically makes her a slut.  Anna views girls who date boys she likes as sluts, even if she never uses the term in relation to them--the implication is definitely there.  Anna's friends say they don't believe that she slept with the guy, but it's also implied that if she had, they wouldn't be friends anymore.  Because sleeping with your boyfriend obviously means you're a total slut.  Yes, this is a book about high school students, but one would expect better behavior from our protagonists--both Anna and her friends.

There's also an uncomfortable amount of "friendzone" mentality in this, in which Anna thinks that, because she's close friends with St. Claire when he's having a hard time, he should totally break up with his girlfriend and be with her, even though she actually has no idea what his relationship with his girlfriend is right.  Ultimately, of course, St. Claire is attracted to Anna in return, but that isn't my point.  My point this that, just as girls are not machines you put friendship coins into until sex comes out, neither are boys, and this mentality isn't any healthier on a female main character than it would have been on a male one, though I think this book would be getting a lot more flack if it was St. Claire who had displayed this attitude and not Anna.

Anna was my second-favorite book in this trilogy, and despite the new flaws that I've seen it I think it retains that spot.  It has inherent flaws, yes.  But I am willing to give it some slack, because the story is so charming and the slow-building romance is so delicious, and it's a first book.  Lola is my least favorite and Isla takes the top spot, though now I might have to re-read and re-evaluate those with a more studied eye, as well.

Originally I had rated this 5 stars; at this point, I'm knocking it down to somewhere between 3.5 and 4 stars, marking at 4 for Goodreads purposes.

Wallbanger - Alice Clayton (Cocktail #1)

Wallbanger is a book that was much-talked-about in the Unapologetic Romance Readers group on Goodreads, was featured quite highly on many "enemies to lovers" lists (a category I needed to fill for my romance reading challenge) and also had a hefty waiting list for the library, which is usually a good indicator.  So I went for it!

Well, this is an enemies-to-lovers story, yes, but but it's really an enemies-to-friends-to-lovers story, and the enemies portion is very short.  Essentially, the story is about Carolina, who's newly moved into a gorgeous apartment in San Francisco that her boss at an interior design company is letting her sublet, when she discovers that she has a very noisy neighbor.  Mainly, a guy who's having sex with three women--not at the same time--which Carolina dubs Spanx, Purina, and the Giggler due to their, erm, sexual proclivities.  There's an embarrassing incident in which Carolina confronts the neighbor while wearing a sexy pink nightie, and then at a housewarming party, they officially meet and find that their friends are very attracted to each other but apparently the couples are mixed up.  Carolina and Simon, as the neighbor is called, set out to fix this and begin a long, slow burn of verbal foreplay.  Their banter is witty and sexy, and you can definitely feel the chemistry there...until they actually begin to have sex, which is not nearly as sexy as all of the lead-up led me to believe it would be, given that Carolina is preoccupied with trying to be witty regarding her "lost" orgasm, which she talks about for a lot of the book.

The real strength here is the characters.  Carolina and Simon are both fully fleshed-out characters and their friends are pretty great, too.  It was refreshing to actually see Carolina having positive relationships with other women, because that's so rare in romance novels, where most women are just presented as competition at best.  But these girls had regular brunches, still got together to get ready for parties together, meddled relentlessly but helpfully in each others' love lives... It was nice.  Simon's friends aren't as present because the book is entirely from Carolina's point of view, but Simon himself has a backstory that, while tragic, is also believable.  He has a career and a life and passions other than just sticking his dick in whatever comes by, and even his three sexual relationships early in the book stem from a believable place, and he's also a very respectful guy.  Carolina was also good; her obsession with not being able to have an orgasm for most of the book got old pretty fast, since the maximum amount of time she goes without talking about it is about about two pages, and she tries to be funnier than I think Clayton is really capable of, but she had ambitions and dreams and was overall a good character.

Oh, and Clayton does have a knack for writing descriptions of food and places.  From the Sausalito house to the lodge in Tahoe to the coast of Spain, the locations and all of the foods and drinks that come with them were top-notch.  You could pretty much read this book for food porn in addition to, you know, real porn.

But while the characters and lead-up were enjoyable for this book, it's missing a pivotal conflict.  The "conflict," as it is, consists entirely of Carolina going "Well I like him but I haven't had an orgasm in a while and besides he's having sex with three girls despite the fact that I know very well he hasn't been having sex with three girls since we officially met."  There's a bit of a snafu involving a hot tub in Tahoe, about halfway through the book, but it's relatively minor and once the awkwardness is dealt with, it's just a slide to them having sex for the remainder of the book.

This is the first in a series of four books, with the second also focusing on Carolina and Simon and the other two focusing on different couples.  I'm not really interested more Carolina and Simon, but I might look into the other two books.  I do hope that they have a stronger central conflict other than "I wants the sex but noooooooo!" though.

3 stars out of 5.

Kitchen Confidential - Anthony Bourdain

I originally had Bourdain's book No Reservations slated for my reading challenge this year, but absolutely nowhere had it available.  So I picked another book for that category and got this one from the library instead.  It's probably better that way, since this was Bourdain's first book and laid the groundwork for a lot of his career, which is of course what I've been watching on Netflix.

This is the updated edition, which has a bit of a foreword and an afterword that serves as a kind of "where are they now" catch-up section, and a PS section that has discussion, an interview, etc.  I didn't care about the PS stuff but the added foreword and afterword were a nice touch.

Here's the thing.  Having watched collections of "No Reservations" (the show, not the book) and "The Layover" on Netflix, I could totally hear Bourdain's voice.  He lays out what he sees as the fundamentals of the restaurant world and the path of his own career.  But then he goes back later on and turns it all on its head, showing that not all cooking crews are the sort that he experienced and seems to seek out.  He doesn't really go into how his life of booze and drugs affected his career at various points, but he also doesn't hide that away, and finally mentions that he hit a point where he knew if he didn't stop, he probably wasn't going to.

And here's the other thing... Bourdain is an ass.  Anyone who's seen him on any of his shows can tell that pretty easily.  But he's so up front about it, without really making himself seem better than others, and I found that I could move past it pretty easily.  There are, of course, moments, when I step back and go, "Wow, Anthony, you're an asshole."  But for the most part, I felt like I could step away from that terribly abrasive part of his personality and still enjoy his writing and his tales of "the culinary underbelly," as the book refers to it.  Bourdain seems to prefer what he calls "pirate crews" which are basically a bunch of former (and sometimes current) criminals and drug addicts and overall people who are just as unsavory as he can be.  But at the same time, as I mentioned before, he brings up kitchens that run as smoothly as a well-oiled clock or a well-choreographed and rehearsed dance.  While he greatly speaks from his own experience, he doesn't pretend that his way is the only way, and I can respect that.

Overall, I found this book a very enjoyable read.  Though I can't say that I look up to him as a person or would ever want to work with him.  But that doesn't meant his stories aren't good or shocking or that this book wasn't good (though sometimes shocking) because it was.

4 stars out of 5.

Tender Is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald

So, I was having a case of a book hangover after reading Meagan Spooner's new book Hunted, a Beauty and the Beast retelling that I really enjoyed.  (I could seriously go read it again right now, even though I just read it not even a week ago; timelines with reviews are a bit off on the blog due to advance scheduling.)  The cure for a book hangover is, for me, to typically go somewhere completely different so I'm not comparing what I'm reading now with what I was reading then, at least not to such a degree.  So I checked out Krakatoa, and then I picked up Tender is the Night, which I've had on my bookshelf for a while and hadn't gotten to yet.

Before this, the only Fitzgerald book I'd read was The Great Gatsby.  I didn't really like that the first time I read it through, but then I read a nonfiction book about the Fitzgeralds called Careless People and found it really enhanced the reading experience--and I think that having previously read Careless People helped with the experience here, as well, because it's so easy to see where Fitzgerald drew in his and his wife Zelda's own lives to flavor the book.  The vacations on the Riviera, the small and exclusive groups of people being "made over" by the main people in the group, the travelling, the partying, and the angst underlying it all... It's all so evident both in the fiction and in the reality that underlies it.

The story here initially seems to follow Rosemary, a young woman who's made her break as an actress and is taking a vacation on the Riviera with her mother when she meets Dick and Nicole Diver.  She promptly falls in love, or at least states that she does, with Dick, and spends the rest of her vacation going after him.  He eventually gives in, somewhat--and then Rosemary vanishes from the picture and it becomes evident that Dick is actually the main character, not Nicole.  The book goes into his backstory, catches back up with the present, and then proceeds, all along showing that Dick is a terrible person.  He marries Nicole, who was a patient in a mental hospital where he was working, and then proceeds to continue fooling around to various degrees with every pretty young woman who comes his way, most of whom are also his patients in some way or another.  This is both extremely unethical and extremely immoral because not only are they his patients but he is already married.  And while Rosemary should have known better than to go after a married man when she was eighteen, and definitely should have known better by the time she was twenty-two, there's absolutely no excuse for Dick, who was a full adult in control of his full mental capacities for the duration of the story.

But then, Fitzgerald likes writing about terrible people.  The Buchanans in Gatsby, for example; it all seems to come back to some circle of how wealth just leads to decadence and its accompanying decay, possibly in another parallel to the Fitzgeralds' own lives.  Watching these people spiral together and then apart is almost wince-worthy, because you can just see the disaster coming.  All of the drama is also exhausting.  But Fitzgerald is a modern classic for a reason, and it shows through.  He has a clean and simple style of writing, one that I think contributed to my dislike of Gatsby when I read it in school because I simply wasn't old enough or wide-read enough to really appreciate the style.  But now I am, and I can definitely see the merit here.  While I didn't like the characters here, the book was still written in such a way that not liking them was the point and was enjoyable.  I think some other books aim to accomplish this, but don't.  Fitzgerald, on the other hand, managed it perfectly, and that's something that's something to be remarked upon.

4 stars out of 5.

Krakatoa - Simon Winchester

Natural disasters hold a fascination for me, just as they do for many others.  They're terrible in the destruction they wreak, sometimes on a global scale, and yet it's hard to look away.  And of course the underlying forces behind the disasters are fascinating in their own right.  Volcanoes are one of the biggest cases of natural disasters, and among them the name "Krakatoa" has its own sort of mystique.

 

Like many others, I first encountered Krakatoa in the children's book The Twenty-One Balloons.  I don't remember a lot about the story, except that it involed a group of Europeans who lived on a volcanic island in the Pacific (the island was misplaced in the book; Krakatoa was actually located in the Indian Ocean in the Sunda Straight) who had crazy houses, and had to flee on a big balloon platform and parachute down to the new places they wanted to live when the volcano that loomed over the island exploded.  All these years later, when I wanted a nonfiction palate cleanser from a particular book hangover I was suffering (thank you, Hunted), I decided that the real story of Krakatoa would be a good candidate.

 

But the thing is, not a heck of a lot is actually known about Krakatoa.  Not many people within distance of actually witnessing its explosion survived; instead, all but a handful were killed by the massive tsunamis (up to a hundred feet high) that pummeled the coasts of both Java and Sumatra and killed probably thirty-five thousand people--only about a thousand died from the usual volcanic killers, such as pyroclastic flows.  But these figures, again, mean that there aren't a lot of witnesses.  Instead, witnesses were limited to a handful of survivors who outran tsunamis (very impressive) and were on ships large enough to ride out the perilous seas in the wake of the eruption.  In addition, not enough was known about volcanology in the late nineteenth century to really document the causes of the eruption.  And, unfortunately, Krakatoa was almost entirely destroyed in the eruption, leaving behind only half of one of its three peaks.  So, while another island has begun to emerge (called the Son of Krakatoa) there's not enough of the original left for modern geologists to examine it for potential insights about the famed eruption.

 

Because of these informational deficits, Winchester bulks out his volume with some of the history of Indonesia, though only its colonial parts.  The focus here is very much on the Dutch colonizers, barely touching on the native population at all except to mention local superstitions about volcanoes and one chapter about the growing resistance that spread in the wake of Krakatoa's eruption, which probably contributed to the resistance (though saying that the eruption caused the resistance, as Winchester muses at one point, is probably a stretch).  He also explains the history of botany in the region and a larger chunk of the book is contributed to a history and explanation of the theory (in this use, theory being fact, as it is used in science) of plate tectonics.  Some of this was interesting, and I think it probably is needed in some form for a book of this nature, but the sheer amount of page time devoted to it seemed a bit excessive when a simpler explanation could have accomplished the same understanding.

 

Then there's the writing.  Some of it is vivid and engaging.  Some of it is dry as dirt and I found myself skimming paragraph after paragraph.  There doesn't actually appear to be much rhyme or reason to when the writing is good and when it's a bit rough, either.  The good and bad parts both appear in all parts of the book, in all topics.  The drier bits do seem to have some issues with structure, which seems to be an editing problem or at least a problem that should have been weeded out during editing; they're frequently confusing in how they're written and there are a lot of weird paragraph breaks that didn't seem to really be necessary.  And one big thing did bother me: I had no idea where Krakatoa actually was.  This book has a wealth of illustrations, photographs, diagrams, and maps, but despite all of that I found myself pulling up Google Maps to figure out where all of this was actually taking place--Krakatoa not being labelled on any of the wider maps of the region, and not enough specificity being given for me to envision it without a proper map.

 

Still, the story of this remarkable mountain was intriguing, enough to have me neglecting another book to read it.  That said, you have to go into it with the awareness that the portion about the eruption itself and its direct consequences is not very long at all.  I'm pretty used to this from history books, which never seem to focus as much on their titular subjects as one would think, but I can definitely see it bothering others, so reader beware in that respect.

 

4 stars out of 5.

Starfall - Melissa Landers (Starflight #2)

I read the first novel in this duology, Starflight, a few months ago and absolutely loved it.  Did I have some misgivings about the beginning and how the characters got into each others' presence?  Yes.  Yes I did.  And I brought them up in my review.  But overall, I thought Starflight was a lovely young adult sci-fi romance with a slow burn and a feel that would appeal to those who liked Firefly and Serenity, though Landers' book didn't purport itself to be a substitute for either.  So I had high hopes for Starfall.

Unfortunately, it didn't live up to them.  While there aren't any big, glaring flaws in Starfall, it lacks the magic and pop and sparkle of its predecessor.

The main characters here are Cassia and Kane, two of the shipmates whom we met in Starflight.  Cassia is, of course, a secret princess--as is the way things go.  She fled an arranged marriage on her home world and seems to have started a war into the bargain, and she's been fleeing from bounty hunters called the Daeva ever since--as has Kane, because he helped her escape.  Cassia and Kane are very close, sort of friends-with-benefits sometimes but without the full array of benefits (Landers makes a point of saying that they've never "gone all the way" several times) but their relationship is also fraught with friction because Cassia doesn't really know what she wants.  But when the Daeva get Cassia and haul her back to her home world, she's thrown into the position of becoming a monarch, stopping a war, and putting down a rebellion, all at once, and even when Kane shows up to rescue her--though rescue doesn't end up being needed--it seems like she doesn't have time to pursue any sort of relationship anymore.  And then a mysterious illness starts taking down her people, and she can't figure out how to stop it...

The problem with this book is, I think, that it ultimately got too big for itself.  Starflight had a relatively small and narrow plot, though there was a sideplot that was a bit more expansive.  In Starfall, the big plot--Cassia's political situation and attempts to help her people--are center stage, and the developing and re-developing relationship with Kane is secondary.  The other characters from the cargo ship Banshee also feature much less here than they did in the first book, which was disappointing because the crew was such an integral part of the story, and how their personalities and experiences meshed really contributed to the excellent feel the first book had.  That's largely lacking here, and while the crew does appear, they're supplemented by a variety of other side characters that aren't given much time to develop and so only have superficial personalities, backgrounds, and motivations.  The book also doesn't really feel like a romance at all, even though Cassia and Kane's re-connection is supposed to be such a big part.  Instead, the story mainly consists of them running from place to place trying to solve the mystery of who is wreaking havoc on their home world, and then there's some half-concocted thing about gladiator battles at the end.  Yes.  Seriously.  All of this also contributes to a very weird sort of pacing that was inconsistent and didn't add to the book in any way.

Overall, I didn't feel like this added to the Starflight experience at all.  Starflight was shiny and brilliant and developed a rich universe with potential just waiting to be discovered.  Starfall didn't do any of that, and instead threw much of what made the first book brilliant to the side in favor of a big political plot that dragged.  Continuing with this exact plot but keeping Solara and Doran was the main characters actually probably would have worked better than elevating Kane and Cassia to the starring positions; just that change of perspective would have done worlds for improving this book.  As it is, it's okay, but I can't say it's any better than that.

2 stars out of 5.