Sous Chef: 24 Hours on the Line
Michael Gibney, 2014
210 pp.
Book Review by Molly Lundquist
September, 2014
It's enough to make you weep, reading (reading, merely reading!) about what it takes to serve 300 people in an upscale New York restaurant. Why would anyone subject himself to such abuse—the mental and physical strain—night after night?
Michael Gibney's wonderful behind-the-scenes account is a revelation: chefs and cooks aren't like you and me. Their stamina and mental acuity is not the stuff of ordinary mortals; it's superhero stuff—Supermen (and the occasional woman) in chef whites.
A Man Called Ove
Fredrik Backman, 2012 (Engl., 2014)
352 pp.
Book Review by Molly Lundquist
August 2014
Ove is a 59-year-old misanthrope. He's ornery, overbearing, and hard to like. But we keep reading because Fredrik Bachman keeps us laughing—and because there's a bit of truth in Ove's rants...and a bit of each of us in his self-righteousness.
But Ove is done with life—all he wants to do is end his part in it. How hard can this be? Very hard, apparently, especially if you're beset with neighbors who interrupt you at the most inopportune moments, like when you're trying to hang yourself.
The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress
Ariel Lawhon, 2014
308 pp.
Book Review by Molly Lundquist
June 2014
It's a fair bet we won't get a lot of character depth when a single paragraph extols a woman's fine-boned hand, her tangle of pale curls, and tanned shoulders. The same is true with silly descriptions of eyes...cold, flashing, flinty, or otherwise.
But a bit of clunky writing is easy to overlook in this delicious tale of lust and corruption from the 1930s. Ariel Lawhon has dusted off a piece of real history, reimagining an unsolved crime that had once grabbed headlines across the country. Her novel approaches the story from the point of view of the three women involved.
The Wives of Los Alamos: A Novel
TaraShea Nesbit, 2014
240 pp.
Book Review by Molly Lundquist
May, 2014
In luminous, at times poetic prose, TaraShea Nesbit has produced a small gem of a book as she imagines life for the women at famed Los Alamos. The women lived there, in the desert, from 1943 to the end of World War II while their physicists husbands built the first atomic bomb.
Smart, well educated, often professionals in their own right, the women are confined to ramshackle houses, raising children and complaining about dust and muddy water. They resent the secrecy which keeps them in ignorance of what their husbands are working on.
Before We Met
Lucie Whitehouse, 2014
288 pp.
Book Review by Molly Lundquist
February 2014
In the vein of Gone Girl and Before I Go to Sleep, Whitehouse's book dissects a seemingly happy marriage with dire results. In fact, the question all three books pose is whether we can truly know another being—even one we wake up to each morning.
When husband Mark misses his plane back to London and doesn't phone in, Hannah begins to worry. Her concern is heightened when Mark's assistant, and his business partner, both tell her they were under the impression that Mark had taken her, Hannah, to Rome for the weekend. Rome? For the weekend? It's news to Hannah.