Arsenic and Adobo

Finished August 14

Arsenic and Adobo by Mia P. Manansala

This is the first in a series set around a family Filipino restaurant in small town Illinois. The main character, Lila Macapagal had gone to Chicago for university and stayed, running a small business with her boyfriend. But after legal troubles with the business and a horrible breakup, she's moved back to Shady Palms, a couple of hours away from Chicago to help in her aunt's restaurant. Tita Rosie's Kitchen is reasonably popular in town, but the local restaurant critic has panned it repeatedly, despite coming back for more. He, Derek Winters, is also Lila's ex-boyfriend, whom she dated in high school, but left behind when she went to college. It seems that he might harbour some resentment. His new stepfather, Mr. Long, is also the landlord of the restaurant and some of its neighbouring businesses. 

When Derek and Mr. Long come for lunch one day and Derek drops dead in his dessert, accusations against Lila and her aunt begin right away. When later evidence adds to prejudice against both Lila and her aunt, she decides that she must do her own investigation to clear herself and her family since the police don't seem to be looking at anyone else.

Her best friend Adeena works as a barista at the coffee place next door, and the two team up to sleuth. They also get the help of aunties, such as Lila's three godmothers, a regular fixture at Tita Rosie's Kitchen, and deep into community gossip. And yes, the small dog on the cover is Lila's dachshund, Longganisa, Nisa for short. 

As she gets to know fellow restaurant owners, old friends and enemies, and a few new friends, Lila finds herself getting better acquainted with her town as well, and liking it more than she expected. 

There is a glossary for Filipino words, including a lot for food given the setting, and several recipes at the back of the book. 

Last Resort

Finished June 9

Last Resort by Jill Sanders

This is the first book in a series following the Grayton family, a closeknit family made up of children rescued from bad homes. The main character here is the youngest child, Cassandra (Cassey) who is in her mid-twenties for the main story. We see her backstory of joining the family, and then her beginning to owning the Boardwalk Bar and Grill, in a building that was family owned and had previously been run by her aunt Karen, but sat empty for a few years. We see her family chipping in and fixing up the building, which also has a small apartment where Cassey lives. 

This is all in a small beachside community called Surf Breeze on the Florida Gulf coast. As the main part of the book begins, the county has recently stopped running shuttle buses from the larger tourist town of Emerald Beach to Surf Breeze and it is hurting the businesses there. It seems to be a ploy to get the owners of businesses on the boardwalk to sell to a large hotel in Emerald Beach, called Crystal Shores. When Luke, the son of the owner of Crystal Shores is sent to talk to Cassey about selling he finds that he has met his match, and he begins to question his father's tactics and methods of doing business. The chemistry between Cassey and Luke is fast-acting and they become intimate quickly, but that doesn't necessarily equal a relationship. This was an interesting look at a strong woman posing more of a challenge than anticipated, and the respect that she is due for making her business work well. Cassey's siblings are part of the story, except for a sister who disappeared of her own volition a few years ago, and I can already see that there are stories that will develop for each one of them. A fun summer read. 

Gravity Is the Thing

Finished August 14 

Gravity Is the Thing by Jaclyn Moriarty

This book, set mostly in Australia, with a short section set in Montreal, is the story of thirty-six-year-old single mom Abigail Sorensen. The book opens just before her thirty-sixth birthday, where she is on a small island off Tasmania in response to an invitation she received for a big reveal. Starting twenty years ago, when she was sixteen, she began getting random chapters to something called The Guidebook in the mail. She has faithfully sent in address changes and responded most of the time to an annual reflection prompt and is interested to find out what is behind the mailings. However, another part of her associates these mailings with her missing brother, as that also happened when she turned sixteen, just after her first mailed chapter. Despite have a good police liaison and following up every lead, they still don't know what happened to her brother, so part of her hopes for that truth as well. 

She finds a group of people near her age, all of whom had kept getting the chapters from The Guidebook, just as she had. The getaway is run by a man named Wilbur, who is the son of the couple who sent out the chapters. After a couple days spent doing a variety of activities,  a select group of those attending are let in on the secret behind the chapters, and the reaction is underwhelming. Some are disappointed, some upset.

After she goes back home, Abigail is invited again to continue with follow-up sessions and something in the universe seems to be telling her to attend. 

There is a lot going on here. We gradually learn Abigail's story, about what happened when her brother Robert disappeared and how her family dealt with the situation. We know that her mom has a new partner Xuang, who Abigail likes, and we learn about her ex-husband Finnegan. Abigail's son Oscar, four years old as the book begins is a large presence in the book too. Abigail trained as a lawyer, but now she runs her own cafe, one called the Happiness Cafe, in north Sydney. 

We see a selection of the chapters that she received, and they are pretty off the wall, and quite short. As I said, they arrive in a completely random order, and she didn't read all of them, or follow all the instructions that they gave her, although she did some, and they did have an effect on her life as she thinks back. 

As we see her relate to the various people in her life: employees, friends, family, and the new people she meets at Wilbur's sessions, we begin to learn about Abigail. I liked her. I think she'd be fun to know. We see her worries and her daily life. We see some of her thoughts as she goes through her days. This is a book about a woman's life, as she considers it and makes the decisions that will determine where it goes next. I really enjoyed this book. It is hard to classify. There are elements of romance in it at times, but mostly not. There is the mystery of her brother's disappearance, which continues throughout, but is just one of the plot lines. It is really just about life.

Rosewater and Soda Bread

Finished December 26
Rosewater and Soda Bread by Marsha Mehran

This novel takes place in small town Ireland but the main characters are immigrants from Iran, three sisters that live together and run a cafe. 

The oldest sister Marjan Aminpour is the heart of the business and the driving force. She has guilt from her absence from the family during a crisis, one that led to deep sadness for her middle sister Bahar. She has never told her sisters where she was during those days she was missing, that she'd been active in the actions against the Shah's government in Iran, partly due to her love for a young man, and that the printing operation they were running had been raided and she'd been in prison and been tortured. It is this experience that compelled her to focus on her sisters, and when Bahar returned from her ordeal, it was her that organized their flight from Iran to England, and now to Ireland. 

Her friendship in London with another Irish transplant, a woman her own age whose mother came to Ireland from Italy is what brought them to this town a year ago. Her subsequent friendship with the mother, Estelle, brings her into another situation with a girl running from a bad situation. We don't learn her whole story until near the end of the novel, but it is a compelling one. 

We also see the role of the old guard, the ones that resent change and newcomers and the loss of their power in the community. Here, this is personified by the widow Dervla who lives across the street from the Aminpours and she spends most of her day at her front window watching and judging. She has a group of other women who bring her gossip from further afield that she then tries to act on. 

The youngest sister, Layla is a confident schoolgirl, in love with a local boy and wanting to control her own life and fate through her informed decisions. Marjan must learn how to trust Layla to make those decisions, and also how to help accept Bahar's decisions to move forward with her life in an unexpected direction. 

There are other things going on in the town, from the local priest who becomes a pirate DJ on the side, the local doctor, an immigrant from Pakistan who must walk a careful line to stay out of trouble, and the prodigal landowner who has returned to remake the family manor as a destination inn and restaurant. 

And among it all are the seasonal celebrations like Bonfire Night and All Hallows Eve, and of course the food, both Iranian and Irish. Lucky for the reader, several recipes are included here. 

Undercover Bromance

Finished December 19
Undercover Bromance by Lyssa Kay Adams

I enjoyed the first book, The Bromance Book Club, in this series so much when I read it this fall, I put a hold on the second one at my local library, and read it within a couple days of taking it out. 

We could already see the start of this romance at the end of that first one, and it involves one of the single guys that is part of the book club, Braden Mack. Restaurant and bar owner Braden is actually the guy that started the club and we get to look back into his past to see how he developed this interest in romance novels and the purposes of them for this group of male readers. He's been using the books, but not as deeply as he needs to if he wants to have a truly meaningful relationship. And so his date gets across to him after a night at a high end restaurant leads to the end of that relationship, a reconnection with Liv Papandreas, pastry chef and sister of his friend, and a mission to uncover fraud, abuse, and misogyny in their own city of Nashville. 

Liv isn't interested in Braden, and she still holds the time he ate her take-out against him, but he's persistent, and he seems to be able to charm even her feminist landlord. 

I like how these books have humour, depth of plot including some bigger societal issues, and a lot of good, sometimes hot, romance. 

Looking forward to the next one!

Egg Drop Dead

Finished March 21
Egg Drop Dead by Laura Childs

This light mystery takes place in the small town of Kindred in the Midwest. Suzanne, Petra, and Toni own the cafe that they've named the Cackleberry Club. Offshoot niches in the cafe also include a yarn store and a book store. Petra does the majority of the cooking, but all the ladies chip in. Suzanne is making a trip to a local dairy farmer for a wheel of his tasty cheese, but when she gets to the farm, he doesn't come out to meet her like he normally does and she gets a feeling that things aren't right. Sure enough, she finds him dead.
Suzanne has found herself in situations before where she has worked to assist the police to get to the bottom of a crime, but she isn't encouraged to do so here. Her knowledge of the crime scene and her observations of what she saw afterwards make her determined to find out who killed Mike Mullen.
There is also increasing development in the area, where farmlands are sold for development. Is this a factor in this murder? Suzanne finds other shady characters that she considers the motives of, even while hosting a visit from a mobile yarn retailer, and a outdoor party.
The book includes a number of recipes from the various scenes in the cafe,

Rose Reisman's Choose It and Lose It

Finished November 14
Rose Reisman's Choose It and Lose It: the road map to healthier eating at your favourite Canadian restaurants by Rose Reisman

I liked that this book gathered information from a number of restaurants in one spot, and I liked the number of restaurants included. It gave good overviews with history of the restaurants and one other nugget of information. Sometimes this other information was general information on that's restaurants offerings in terms of healthiness, sometimes trivia, sometimes something more specific.
For each restaurant, there was a main "choose it" option, and a main "lose it" option, with three additional items under each category. Sometimes these include a children's menu choice, sometimes an appetizer, sometimes a "snack", sometimes another meal.  For a couple of restaurants with broader menus, there was a double set of entries, giving two main "choose it" and "lose it" items with extra choices under the second mains. (Essentially the restaurant had double the information)
As a person who can't eat cheese, I was surprised to find so many of the "choose it" choices were cheesy. For some restaurants, all of them were, which wasn't personally helpful.
One other thing that I didn't like was that sometimes one of the additional "lose it" choices was healthier than the "choose it" choice. And sometimes the category didn't make sense. A case in point is MacDonald's. The main "choose it" choice is the Big Mac at 540 calories, 29 grams of fat (10 saturated) and 1020 mg of sodium, with the main "lose it" choice as the Angus Deluxe at 780 calories, 47 grams of fat (17 saturated) and 1660 mg sodium. No arguments there. But an additional "lose it" choice is the McChicken Sandwich at 470 calories, 27 grams of fat (5 saturated) and 790 mg sodium. That would be my sandwich choice if I went (because it has no cheese!) and it is healthier than the Big Mac, which is a "choose it". Then I noticed it is listed as a "snack". The "choose it" snack is a cheeseburger. That makes no sense. The McChicken is a regular sandwich choice on their menu, unlike a cheeseburger, and I would have put it in the same category as a Big Mac in terms of choices. Yet it is not recommended, while the Big Mac is. So now I am wondering about the alternatives not listed here (the Quarter Pounder, the Fish Fillet, etc). Are they better or worse than the Big Mac? Now I have to go to McDonald's website to check. So, this entry actually didn't help me other than it made me go looking for more information. (Big Xtra, Quarter Pounder with Cheese, and Fish Fillet are all better than the Big Mac, with the Fish Fillet the best at just 410 calories, 20 g fat, and 580 mg sodium).
So the problem now is that, knowing this, I now feel the need to do this with every restaurant since obviously only some choices are listed for each one and they may not be the best choice at that establishment. For me, this book raised more questions than it answered, and didn't always lead to the best choice. Too bad, because I've loved (and bought) all her cookbooks and was really looking forward to this one. I guess it is good that it raises the idea of some seemingly healthy choices being less good than they appear, and gets people looking for more information, but it certainly wouldn't be my final stop on that search for information.