Julie's Review: Comfort Food

Summary: In this smart, delicious novel by the bestselling author of The Friday Night Knitting Club, a celebrity chef shows her friends and family the joy of fulfillment— and manages to spice up her own life at the same time. Shortly before turning the big 5-0, boisterous party planner and Cooking with Gusto! personality Augusta “Gus” Simpson finds herself planning a birthday party she’d rather not—her own. She’s getting tired of being the hostess, the mother hen, the woman who has to plan her own birthday party. What she needs is time on her own with enough distance to give her loved ones the ingredients to put together successful lives without her. Assisted by a handsome up-and-coming chef, Oliver, Gus invites a select group to take an on-air cooking class. But instead of just preaching to the foodie masses, she will teach regular people how to make rich, sensuous meals—real people making real food. Gus decides to bring a vibrant cast of friends and family on the program: Sabrina, her fickle daughter; Troy, Sabrina’s ex-husband; Anna, Gus’s timid neighbor; and Carmen, Gus’s pompous and beautiful competitor at the Cooking Channel. And when she begins to have more than collegial feelings for her sous-chef, Gus realizes that she might be able to rejuvenate not just her professional life, but her personal life as well. ~amazon.com

Review: I've enjoyed Ms. Jacob's Friday Night Knitting Club Novels, so I figured that I would enjoy Comfort Food as well and I did  but I definitely prefer the ladies of the knitting club to the characters in this one. It's not that I didn't like the women and men in the book but in the end I just didn't connect with any of them on a real level. I liked Gus and her family. I couldn't stand Carmen, even in the end. I don't think she really learned much from her experience. She also ended up getting what she wanted even if she didn't really deserve it in the end. I was actually hoping she would have returned home to Spain.

I loved Gus' extended family. Her daughters Aimee and Sabrina were still looking to find their niche in the world. Her best friend Hannah has her own secret and has been hiding from the world for 15 years. Then there is Troy, Sabrina's ex-boyfriend, who still very much wants to be her boyfriend. He's also an entrepreneur of which Gus has invested in his company.

As much at the book is about food, food isn't a major character in the book. Don't get me wrong, some of the recipes sound divine but it's stuff that I would never try to make myself. Gus' life revolves around food. She's always loved to cook but she never planned on it being her career.

This was a good book for reading quickly and to just enjoy for fun. There are some themes throughout the book which isn't surprising with a novel that focuses on family.

If you haven't read Kate Jacobs before, then I recommend the Friday Night Knitting Club Novels over Comfort Food.

Final Take: 3.5/5

Also, check out Jenn's review.


 

Julie's Review: Knit the Season

Summary: Knit the Season is a loving, moving, laugh-out-loud celebration of special times with friends and family. The story begins a year after the end of Knit Two, with Dakota Walker's trip to spend the Christmas holidays with her Gran in Scotland-accompanied by her father, her grandparents, and her mother's best friend, Catherine. Together, they share a trove of happy memories about Christmases past with Dakota's mom, Georgia Walker-from Georgia's childhood to her blissful time as a doting new mom. From Thanksgiving through Hanuk?kah and Christmas to New Year's, Knit the Season is a novel about the richness of family bonds and the joys of friendship. ~amazon.com

Review: I pre-ordered Knit the Season: A Friday Night Knitting Club Novel when it was released knowing I would want a Christmas/Holiday book to read right around this time of year. I'm glad I picked it up and read it in a weekend. I needed something to boost my spirit since work tends to get extremely hectic this time of year. For those of you who have read the other "Friday Night Knitting Club" books, this one is a great fit into the rest of the series and yes, it makes you want more.

This is like grabbing a cup of coffee and catching up with friends you haven't seen in a while. It's also meant to remind us what the holiday's are really about...family, friends and love. What I liked about this book is that we got to know Georgia a bit more through memories of her friends and family. We also get to know her parents, Tom and Bess, better and this also lends to us understanding Georgia.

Like Knit Two, Knit the Season is told from Dakota's point of view and I felt that it was a real voice of a 20 year old that has a lot on her plate. She's trying to live up to her own expectations of herself and those she feels other's have for her as well.

There is a bunch of change at the end of the book and I'm interested in seeing where Ms. Jacobs takes this series. She certainly has a lot of material to work with if she chooses to continue writing the characters.

I've said in the past that some of the characters annoyed me, but not this time around. They have all seemed to mature a bit.

Final Take: 4.5/5

Jenn's Review: Comfort Food

Summary: Shortly before turning 50, TV cooking show personality Augusta “Gus” Simpson discovers that the network wants to boost her ratings by teaming her with a beautiful, young new co-host. But Gus isn’t going without a fight—whether it’s off-set with her two demanding daughters, on-camera with the ambitious new diva herself, or after-hours with Oliver, the new culinary producer who’s raising Gus’s temperature beyond the comfort zone. Now, in pursuit of higher ratings and culinary delights, Gus might be able to rejuvenate more than just her career.

Review: In my quest for food-lit, and having heard so many good things about Kate Jacobs, I thought I'd give this a try... and, having now read my first Jacobs novel, I confess myself disappointed.

I'm an avid Food Network viewer and I couldn't help but notice that a lot of the character of Gus is ripped straight from Paula Deen's biography, with minor chnages of course. I think this would have been easier for me to accept if she hadn't made it so blatant by making reference to personalities and shows on the Food Network, all the while excluding Ms. Deen. It was extremely off-putting and because of that, I had a hard time getting into this book. When she finally started moving away from that and developing her own characters, it became more engaging. Unfortunately, it took way too long to get there... it wasn't until almost the last third of the book.

Jacobs writing style also doesn't sit well with me. She continually drops bomb-shell like plot exposition and I had to keep back-tracking to make sure that I hadn't skimmed over and missed something earlier in the story. There were sentence fragments and lots of little plot inconsistencies (for example, how does a woman who lost her husband to a car accident not wear a seat belt?!?) that I found nagging.

Also, I even have trouble with qualifying this as food-lit because it really glosses over the food as a whole. There is none of the culinary passion that can be found in an Erica Bauermeister or Sarah Addison Allen novel where the food makes the story. It was more chick-lit formulaic and the denouement was quick and entirely too tidy.

Will I read Jacobs again? I'm not sure, I'm a little nonplussed about it.

Final Take 2.9/5

Julie's Review: Knit Two

Summary: Continuing the warm-and-fuzzy saga begun in her popular The Friday Night Knitting Club, Jacobs stitches together another winning tale of the New York City knitting circle, more a sisterhood than a hobby group (the irascible Darwin Chiu can't even really knit). In this installment-and it does feel like an installment-readers catch up five years after the unexpected, book-capping death of club leader (and knitting shop owner Georgia Walker. Georgia's 18-year-old Dakota is at NYU, discovering her first love, while her father James and Georgia's best friend Catherine are still coming to terms. The rest of the cast runs a wide gamut of ages and experience, but is easier to follow this time around, as Jacobs is more comfortable giving them more space and backstory. Pregnant, whip-smart professor Darwin and her husband, Dan, are welcoming twins; video director and single mom Lucie is coping with a hyperactive 5-year-old and a failing parent; Georgia's old mentor, the wise Anita, begins questioning her own motives; and everyone's stories cross paths in satisfying, organic ways. A trip to Italy provides some forward motion, and pays off in a charming denouement that nevertheless pushes a familiar it's-the-journey-not-the-destination message; still, this sequel is as comforting, enveloping and warm as a well-crafted afghan. ~amazon.com

Review: Knit Two is better than The Friday Night Knitting Club. We jump 5 years ahead and we are quickly brought up to speed pretty quickly on all of the characters we are introduced to in the first one. What I want out of a sequel is to see some growth in the main characters and we definitely get that. The one that grows the most though is Catherine and that was very refreshing to see since it would have been easy to write her as a stereotype. I also love the change that comes about in Darwin after she becomes a mom. It's almost like she "gets" it now. The one I relate the most to is Lucie. Now I'm not a single mom but anyone who has a strong-willed child will see where she's coming from.

There are some twists and turns in the book which is refreshing and invigorating. We learn more about Anita and actually meet her son Nathan when he shows up to keep Anita from making a huge mistake.

Dakota is refreshing as an 18 year old who is stuck in between trying to find out who she is and trying to live up to the Club and her dad's expectation of her. She and James are trying to still get to know each other and he's trying to fill the gap of having lost her mom. What James needs to figure out is that it's ok to grieve and it's ok to not try to be everything. He's also trying to make up for the 12 years that he was not in Dakota and Georgia's life.

The climax of the book is satisfying and yet I did see one twist coming in about the middle of the book. I actually wouldn't mind if Ms. Jacobs decides to revist this group of fantastic women in the future.

Final Take: 4.5/5

Friday Night Knitting Club Review

Julie's Review: The Friday Night Knitting Club

Summary: Between running her Manhattan yarn shop, Walker & Daughter, and raising her 12-year-old biracial daughter, Dakota, Georgia Walker has plenty on her plate in Jacobs's debut novel. But when Dakota's father reappears and a former friend contacts Georgia, Georgia's orderly existence begins to unravel. Her support system is her staff and the knitting club that meets at her store every Friday night, though each person has dramas of her own brewing. Jacobs surveys the knitters' histories, and the novel's pace crawls as the novel lurches between past and present, the latter largely occupied by munching on baked goods, sipping coffee and watching the knitters size each other up. Club members' troubles don't intersect so much as build on common themes of domestic woes and betrayal. It takes a while, but when Jacobs, who worked at Redbook and Working Woman, hits her storytelling stride, poignant twists propel the plot and help the pacing find a pleasant rhythm.~amazon.com/Publisher's Weekly

Review: I picked up The Friday Night Knitting Club based on a bunch of great reviews in the blogging world and I wasn't disappointed. I don't knit and don't think that you have to, to enjoy the book. My aunt knits and I've been to the knit shop that she buys her supplies from many times and that's what I kept picturing in my head while reading. I liked the fact that Ms. Jacobs had an inter-racial relationship as one of the main focuses in the book; although I feel like she could have explored the issues that a bi-racial child would face a little more, but there's only so much you can write about in one book. She also brings up the issues a bi-racial couple would encounter but then drops them with an easy out in my opinion. I enjoyed all the characters in the book but didn't fall in love with any of them. I liked how Ms. Jacobs let each female's story be told over time, you didn't get the full story at once. What I thought was great was how the only thing that these women had in common at first was knitting but that it developed into much more over the course of the book. You can bond over one thing and find out that your have so much else in common. I have a few friends that has happened with and it's wonderful to discover friendships in places you wouldn't have guessed.

I felt like the book's ending was rushed and, while I was satisfied with the ending, I think there could have been more to the story. I thought Cat's storyline wrapped up too nice and neat for the struggles someone in her situation might have happen to them. I enjoyed the style in which Ms. Jacobs wrote the novel and how knitting was central in the beginning of every chapter and even used knitting needles to separate breaks in the chapter. I thought that was quite clever.

SPOILER: My problem with books like this is that they bring in the big "C" and have a main character die from it. What would be more interesting and inspirational is if the person survived and how it changes their life. I know that the statistics for Ovarian cancer aren't very
favorable but I also do know people survive it too.

Overall the book is a great testament to female friendships and the things that bind us together.

Final Take: 4.25/5