Book of the Day Roundup: January 13-17, 2025
Big Veg Energy
Plant-Based Just Got Better
Christina Soteriou
Joe Woodhouse, photographer
Interlink Books
Hardcover $35.00 (256pp)
978-1-62371-623-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Chef and holistic nutritionist Christina Soteriou’s cookbook Big Veg Energy draws on her Greek Cypriot heritage to bring an eclectic, international vibe to vegan cuisine.
The book begins by tackling some of the obstacles people often confront when considering a vegan diet, from confusion about where to buy (and how to use) unfamiliar ingredients to concerns that a whole-food, plant-based vegan diet will leave them hungry and deficient in necessary vitamins and minerals. Also tackled are concerns that vegan eating is too expensive, that soy is harmful, and that plant-based diets harm the environment. The book dispels such myths, backing up its assertions with research studies and evidence of everyday people and top athletes thriving on vegan diets.
Created to feel indulgent as well as being highly nutritious, the flavorful recipes run the gamut from enticing tapas to meals, snacks, and appetizers. There are balanced platter-sized meals, cozy bowls, baking-dish-sized creations to satisfy a family, tempting desserts, and a variety of innovative condiments that can take a meal from good to great. Included are recipes for Miso Quinoa Beet Burgers, Panisse-Style Chickpea Tofu with Hot Maple Syrup, Spicy Mushroom Skewers with Peanut Lime Sauce, Miso Eggplant on Herby Rice Noodles, Green Coconut Noodle Soup, Chocolate Tart with Salted Oat Base, and Roasted Pears with Chai Custard.
The book is colorful and attractive, and its preparation instructions are clear and easy to follow, and suggestions are given for possible ingredient substitutions. Practical money-saving tips are given, such as preventing waste by labeling stored items with contents and dates, and a conversion table and helpful instructions for storing fresh produce are included.
Big Veg Energy is an appealing cookbook that takes a practical, adventurous approach to healthful, nutritious, and delicious vegan cuisine.
KRISTINE MORRIS (December 23, 2024)
The Promise of Language
A Memoir
Keith Gilyard
Wayne State University Press
Softcover $26.99 (166pp)
978-0-8143-5194-9
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Keith Gilyard’s sprawling memoir The Promise of Language makes a passionate case for the power of language, particularly Black language, to transform lives and enliven art and culture.
Born in Harlem and raised in Queens, Gilyard grew up surrounded by the rhythms of Black vernacular speech and music. The son of Southerners, he learned early on to become a “language chameleon,” watching as his mother, who dropped her Southern accent, altered her language patterns as she moved between work, church, and home. Influenced by Harlem street talk, Black radio, and gospel, Gilyard’s interest in language and writing blossomed even as his teachers within the newly desegregated New York public school system attempted to adjust his speech to meet white standards of “correctness.”
Gilyard describes his movements toward writing against the backdrop of rapid transformations in the US—the Cold War, the civil rights movement, and the burgeoning Black Power and Black Arts movements. In lively, nuanced, and often amusing vignettes, he describes his tumultuous experiences attempting to balance his dedication to academics with his growing political zeal and forays into drug addiction and petty crime. Always concerned with social change and Black radical politics, he asserts the connection between language, art, and struggles for liberation as he writes with tender admiration for the generations of writers who nurtured his talent and uplifted Black experiences.
Gilyard’s love for language is made evident through the memoir’s rich and fluid prose, which moves seamlessly between multiple linguistic registers and modes. While detailing his own coming-of-age, Gilyard also provides arresting accounts of the lives that shaped his, honoring friends and mentors and thereby conserving the collective memory of a place and transformative moment in time.
The Promise of Language is a compelling memoir about how, in its author’s words, “language shapes lives and…lives shape language.”
BELLA MOSES (December 23, 2024)
The Heart Is a Star
Megan Rogers
Central Avenue
Hardcover $28.00 (288pp)
978-1-77168-390-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Megan Rogers’s engrossing novel The Heart Is a Star dissects life, love, and truth.
Layla, a troubled mother, wife, and anesthesiologist, navigates a turbulent life and an uncomfortable past. When her distant mother calls with suicidal thoughts near Christmas, Layla sets off to stop her. She also pursues long-desired answers about her late father.
Layla is an engaging if sorrowful heroine who dedicates her time and attention to caring for others, but repeated arguments with her husband and past abuses leave her feeling confused about how best to care for herself. This leads to an affair that serves only as a distraction, a medical oversight that results in the death of a patient, and mishandling difficult situations by retreating to nostalgic mementos and memories.
Layla’s aunt is a strong presence throughout, accompanying her as both a confidant and an emotional anchor. Her late father is given a great deal of focus as well through flashbacks, and Layla returns to his astronomical teachings for comfort and direction: “The only thing an astronomer can do is decipher the past… . When we look at Sirius in the night sky, we are not seeing it as it is now but how it was 8.6 years ago.”
The book is set primarily in the seaside town of Layla’s past, a place of unpredictable weather, domineering nature, and a close-knit community whose residents Layla knows well. Many act as extended family members upon her return, including former neighbors and an old flame. All have their own struggles and secrets. And although lengthy descriptions and abundant flashbacks impede the book’s pace, Layla’s struggles and searches lead her to a satisfying, if bittersweet, place in time.
A novel with much to ponder, The Heart Is a Star follows a woman as she faces old wounds in order to heal.
BRANDON PAWLICKI (December 23, 2024)
The Elephant and the Purim Crown
Haviva Kierzenblat
Rebeca Luciani
Kar-Ben Publishing
Hardcover $18.99 (32pp)
979-876561989-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In this moving picture book, Rachel is looking forward to the Purim festival, hoping that her elaborate costume will help her win the coveted Purim crown. On the way to the synagogue, her cousin sees a man offering elephant rides. Rachel feels like Queen Esther on the elephant’s back—until she notices its injured feet. After winning the crown, Rachel returns, offering it as payment for the elephant; her kindness influences its owner.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (December 23, 2024)
The Poison Girl
Suzanne Manizza Roszak
Spuyten Duyvil
Softcover $22.00 (226pp)
978-1-963908-39-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Suzanne Manizza Roszak’s radiant novel The Poison Girl, a brilliant, determined girl escapes the maledictions of her jealous father.
Just after Bice was born, her beleaguered mother died. Her father—perhaps blaming himself; perhaps merely wanting to control the deceased’s facsimile—did not register Bice’s birth. Instead, he set about making the girl’s presence untenable to others.
In time, Bice’s father relocated his family to a suburb “designed for averageness” where their presence was ignored. Her brother escaped them, but carried his guilt with him; her father planted a toxic garden to deepen his control over his youngest. When the sight of her father tearing apart a poisoned bird shakes Bice from her stupor, small rebellions follow, including autodidacticism via the library, a perspective-broadening friendship, and her own breaking away.
Though it edges toward tragic territory, the novel escapes mere heartbreak thanks to its heroine’s singular determination. Condemned to exist in an “interminable,” “blank white space,” and having been denied safe pathways to love, she nonetheless seeks out companions. She determines to become a mother—and does so. Her story is one of incandescent reversals: hobbled by a cruel father, she protects her own child with ferocity. Sure few will believe what’s been done to her, she nonetheless rages against her condition, her sense of fairness keen:
The problem with popular notions of female hysteria is that they lead both girls and women not to be believed when we discover that our lives have been made a nightmare without our consent.
Throughout, Bice readies herself to protect her delicate, self-made sanctuary against those who dare to underestimate her.
The Poison Girl is an extraordinary novel about maternal love in which a woman refuses to let her father’s heinous actions determine her future.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (December 23, 2024)
Kathy Young
