Book of the Day Roundup: January 22-26, 2024
The Kitchen Commune
Meals to Heal and Nourish Everyone at Your Table
Chay Wike
Flashpoint Books
Hardcover $34.95 (256pp)
978-1-959411-18-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Chay Wike’s cookbook The Kitchen Commune meets diverse dietary needs, introducing one hundred-plus creative dishes that welcome all to the table.
A serious health issue sparked Wike’s determination to take control of her health through nutrition. Now a certified integrative health coach, she touts the benefits of communal dining. While her recipes are free of gluten, dairy, refined sugar, eggs, soy, rice, beans, and processed foods (and while most exclude plants of the nightshade family), all are tasty and nutrient-dense.
The book’s crisp, colorful photographs ignite the imagination, and Wike’s kind, cheerful banter invites both beginners and experienced cooks to experiment without fear. Vegetables, fruits, healthful fats, and protein from wild fish and pastured animals—foods less likely to cause allergic reactions or inflammation—are featured in recipes for Slow-Roasted Ribs with Sticky Plum Barbecue Sauce, Clams with Ginger-Coconut Broth, and Lemon Spaghetti. Customizing recipes for individual palates and dietary needs is made easy with helpful suggestions for substitutions, and special attention is given to sauces for their ability to unite diverse ingredients into a flavorful, pleasing whole.
The cookbook’s insightful suggestions for mindful, considerate food preparation include thinking in threes (serving three main dishes so that people have satisfying choices without standing out for having to make them); cooking ahead for a week; and being curious and trying new foods. There’s a reminder that a pantry stocked with flavorful, nutrition-packed items forestalls the need to call up less healthful substitutes at a moment’s notice. Wike lists her favorite items, and even experienced cooks will find her explanations of why to choose one over another enlightening.
The Kitchen Commune is a creative cookbook that addresses diverse dietary needs with over one hundred recipes for delicious, healthful meals.
KRISTINE MORRIS (December 27, 2023)
The Fair Folk
Su Bristow
Europa Editions
Softcover $18.00 (464pp)
979-888966012-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A lonely girl peeks beyond the veil, ensuring a childhood of wonder and silence, in Su Bristow’s enchanting novel The Fair Folk.
Felicity’s earliest memories are of peering up from her baby carriage at the fairy faces grinning down at her from the foliage above. There was not much such magic available to her on her languishing family farm; thus, she spent her formative years trying to coax that attention back. And in time, it worked: the fae let her in. Felicity ducked under a hedge and gathered with gorgeous Elfrida and her band of mischievous fae around fires through enchanted nights, clothed in impossible garments; she was allowed to peek at, but not move toward, Onward, from where fairies never return. Someday, she was told, she might be allowed to stay forever.
But then Felicity made a bargain with Elfrida and became one more human reminder that fairy magic always carries unknown, often grave, costs.
In time, Felicity left the farm for Cambridge; Elfrida and Hob tagged along, unseen by all but her. They played tricks on others and interfered with her days; she was forbidden to speak of them to anyone. Her introductions to Sebastian and to a professor experienced with fae represented two possible paths forward—the first promised love, the second answers. For the first time, Felicity dared to wonder what Elfrida truly wanted from their bargain.
Twining classic fairy lore with a modern story of an aching girlhood and first love, The Fair Folk is an enthralling novel filled with breathtaking revelations. At every turn, its heroine is reminded anew that a wish granted is not often a dream come true; still, she persists in trusting her ethereal friends, certain that her belief in magic beyond imagining will cushion her in the end.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (December 27, 2023)
Jump for Joy
Karen Gray Ruelle
Hadley Hooper, illustrator
Astra Young Readers
Hardcover (32pp)
978-1-66260-202-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Joy has always wanted a dog; Jump has always wanted a kid. As they wait for the right companion, they make substitutes out of flowers, ferns, sand, and snow, but their formed friends never last. The book utilizes white space and stark black-and-white illustrations to evoke Jump and Joy’s loneliness; the characters are in a different illustration style, further emphasizing their isolation. Only when the pair find each other do their worlds fill with color.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (December 27, 2023)
The Last Immortal
Natalie Gibson
BHC Press
Hardcover $30.00 (422pp)
978-1-64397-254-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Fantasy and horror meld in Natalie Gibson’s striking novel The Last Immortal, which is full of sexuality and psychological warfare.
Ramillia is a passionate and dangerous heroine who’s been broken by her incredible powers. She awakes in a Victorian asylum where she questions what part she played in the violent past that’s revealed to her by her doctors—and through a maze of internal and exterior battles with multiple personas who want her power. Exploring her powers with her betrothed, Julian, takes her on an adventure through a reimagined Victorian London, where some can inhabit the bodies of others, and where people are “obsessed with the occult” to the extent that “the line between scientific and superstitious blurred, leading to the rise of Spiritualism.”
But this is no ordinary novel exploring the psyche. Though it includes vivid descriptions of sadomasochism, sexual abuse, rape, and eroticism, the book is more focused on women’s rights (in the context of Victorian Age London through to the early 1900s in the United States). Ramillia, on a quest to become the last of her kind, questions her place in a man’s world. And along with Ramillia’s battles within and outside of society, she deals with the trauma of continual loss—and with blinding rage. She often questions what part she plays in the accumulating losses that she experiences, and she sees her own faults developing in her children and must face these truths.
Traveling from Victorian London to New York City and China, The Last Immortal is an epic fantasy novel following the tribulations of a most unusual, powerful woman as she battles to understand, and come to terms with, her own immortality.
CLARISSA ADKINS (December 27, 2023)
Womb City
Tlotlo Tsamaase
Erewhon Books
Hardcover $28.00 (416pp)
978-1-64566-056-9
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Tlotlo Tsamaase’s fearsome futuristic novel Womb City, a woman struggles to escape the dystopian horror of her AI-controlled existence.
Twenty-eight-year-old Nelah lives in Botswana with her police officer husband, Elifasi. Technological advancements allowed the government to repurpose various human bodies; these “shells” are used to house the consciousnesses of other wait-listed souls. The bodies of criminals must be monitored with microchips to ensure that errant behaviors aren’t repeated.
Though Nelah is a successful architect, she inhabits the body of a former criminal. Because of her potential for deviance, Nelah’s husband has access to her mental and physical capacities; he performs a daily microchip assessment, inserting the probe with detachment, like he “uses his penis.” Elifasi also has the further secret ability to activate Nelah’s sexual desire with a remote control device.
Nelah’s existence is commandeered by her microchip, but she still experiences intense emotions. She longs to have a child. Following a series of miscarriages, she and Elifasi consult a fertility clinic. As their daughter’s “curated” embryo begins to grow in a clinic “Wombcubator,” Nelah lovingly monitors the baby’s progress with her smartphone.
In this surreal, stratified world, scientific and governmental overreach intersect with human corruption. Women of color like Nelah are the primary targets of exploitation, while “body-hops” into white identities are the most desirable. In countries like Nigeria and Uganda, LGBTQIA+ individuals are also microchipped; if same-sex activity is detected, their bodies will be imprisoned and cremated.
As the book’s narrator, Nelah’s voice is captivating and valiant. Caught up in a forbidden extramarital affair, she manages to briefly elude her technological enslavement and later enters a murderous spiral of violent liberation.
With both chilling precision and anguished passion, Womb City depicts a toxic future of cyber-reincarnation and authoritarian omniscience.
MEG NOLA (December 27, 2023)
Barbara Hodge
