Category: books
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Book Review: The Essential Instant Pot Cookbook by Coco Morante
At what point when reading a cookbook do you make the decision to just go ahead and purchase a copy for yourself? Wait, you don’t read cookbooks? I do. I check out bags of them from the library and read them cover to cover like my favorite mysteries or biographies. Sometimes I jot down a…
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Book Review: Murder in a Teacup by Vicki Delany
Guilty as charged: I judged this book entirely by its cover. I had not heard of Vicki Delany before I saw this book on the “librarian’s picks” shelf at my local library, but a cover with a table set for afternoon tea in the foreground, a cat sleeping on a windowsill, and sailboats in the…
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Book Review: Love & Saffron by Kim Fay
If books were people, and if Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin married 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff, and if those two book-people had a baby, it would be Love & Saffron by Kim Fay, and that baby’s godmother would be Ruth Reichl. I devoured this book in one day. Granted I was in…
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Book Review: The Hygge Holiday by Rosie Blake
For two years I lived in a small town near Brussels, Belgium, and seeking to make friends, I joined an international cooking club. There were twelve members, and we were each assigned a month where we hosted the entire group for lunch, with foods from our own culture. Each month was new and exciting, learning…
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Book Review: Jazz Age Cocktails by Cecelia Tichi
Don’t be confused by the title of this book. Yes, it is about cocktails popular during the Jazz Age, but this is not just a book of cocktail recipes. It is a history book, a book of US social history during the time of Prohibition, with recipes for the cocktails of the day sprinkled throughout.…
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Book Review: Soomi’s Sweater by Susie Oh
This is a short and sweet picture book, but for me the illustrations are far superior to the story line. Susie Oh’s drawings have captured the soft, maternal feelings that I know so well from having raised two daughters of my own. I could feel the excitement from Soomi when she received a new sweater,…
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Book Review: The Dig by John Preston (Other Press, 2007)
At some point during the pandemic, my husband and I watched the Netflix original film The Dig (Netflix, 2021) starring Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan. We were both quite taken with it. I immediately googled it and found that it was based upon a work of historical fiction of the same name by John Preston.…
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Interview: Eman Quotah, author of Bride of the Sea
See my most recent published piece for Washington Independent Review of Books: http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/features/an-interview-with-eman-quotah
Michelle Blanchard Ardillo 