Cheese, Please: Sandwich Generation Revelation

I've read all of Amy E. Reichert's books, and The Optimist's Guide to Letting Go is the best.  Here's why:  

It's been two years since Milwaukee-based, glass-half-full Gina Zoberski's husband Drew passed away.  Despite her still-broken heart, Gina soldiers on, raising her handful of a teenage daughter and avoiding her withholding mother, all while serving up sandwiches with a smile from her food truck, Grilled G's.  But when Gina's mother suffers a stroke, she's forced to let her into her life and face some truths about her own.

What makes this book work, at least for me, is the way Reichert gets inside both Gina's and her mother's heads.  She convincingly voices two very different women while at the same time showing how they're the same.  The result is a memorable mother-daughter story, mixed with bittersweet romance and, of course, lots of dairy.

With heart as well as insight into Milwaukee foodie culture, The Optimist's Guide to Letting Go is comfort food for the spirit.

Having My (Coconut) Cake and Eating it Too

I've always hated the saying "having your cake and eating it too."  Because what are you supposed to do with cake if not eat it?  Let it sit around and attract vermin?  Nevertheless, when it came time to blog about two recent reads, one of which happened to have "cake" in the title, my love of puns outweighed my distaste for this phrase.  And so that's how you came to be reading Having My Coconut Cake and Eating it Too, a microsummary of Amy E. Reichert's The Coincidence of Coconut Cake and Jenn McKinlay's Death of a Mad Hatter.  The first is about a delicious confection; the other is about hats that look like delicious confections -- or at least about hats that can be worn while eating said confections and trying not to get murdered.  

The Coincidence of Coconut Cake serves up a Milwaukee meet-cute between a struggling restauranteur and a cranky food critic.  After nearly colliding over a decadent coconut cake, the two embark upon an unlikely friendship, neither aware of the other's identity or the impact it has on their lives.  In Death of a Mad Hatter, London millinery mavens craft crowns for an Alice in Wonderland-themed tea party gone horribly wrong.  Lives are at stake there too -- literally.  Will the critic ever get a chance to show the restauranteur that he's as layered as that cake?  Will the mavens escape the melee with their hats and lives intact?  Although I already sensed the answers (I'm no Sherlock Holmes, but I do read a lot of fiction), what I most enjoyed were the journeys on the way to finding out for sure.  Because sometimes  -- okay, most of the time -- what I crave from reading is comfort.

And few things are more comfortable than cake.  

So to whoever first said that you can't have your cake and it eat it too, I say this: 

Shut your pie hole and swallow already.  

Breakin' All the Rules This Jule (P. S. That's Danish for Christmas)

Ornaments: Hallmark

Contrary to this pic, Amy E. Reichert's Once Upon a December isn't about birds.  It's about time travel and raw meat sandwiches.  Sort of.

Like Reichert's The Kindred Spirits Supper Club, December takes place in Wisconsin.  And apparently in Wisconsin, it's customary to eat "cannibal sandwiches," which consist of rye bread, raw onions, and raw ground beef.  Which is just . . . yeah.  All I can say is that it's not something that ever came up on That '70s Show.  Hello, Wisconsin indeed!

But you don't want to kibitz about beef.  You want to talk about time travel.  (At least I assume you do, unless you've already cut and run in search of something thoroughly cooked to gnaw on.)  

Astra Noel Snow is a thirty-seven-year-old divorced librarian with a circle of friends and a dog that are her everything.  Still, she'd really like a special someone.  And when she walks into a Scandinavian bakery on the outskirts of the Milwaukee Christmas market, she thinks she might have found him.  The guy serving up cherry kringle isn't just cute and sweet, he's vaguely familiar -- quite literally the man of her dreams.  At least that's what Astra thinks at first.  But as she gets to know Jack Clausen, she slowly realizes that she's met him, not in her dreams, but in real life, once (or twice) upon a December.  Entranced and intrigued, Astra puts her librarian skills to use to research the bakery and other shops in the enchanted alley known as the Julemarked.  What she finds makes her question everything, changing her life forever. 

Haunting and mystical, Once Upon a December gifts readers with Christmas magic as out-of-this-world as Jack's signature kringle.  As charming as it is strange, Reichert's yuletide universe explores and celebrates the mysteries of the space-time continuum and of falling in love.  And as a fan of Christmastime, time travel, and romance, I'm here for it.

Raw meat sandwich (and its little dog too!) notwithstanding.

Charmer in the Dell: The Cheese Stands Alone (But Not Always)

I never wanted to try fried cheese curds until I read Amy E. Reichert's novel The Kindred Spirits Supper Club.  I was so intrigued by them that this post's working title was Word to the Curd: Make Whey for More Cheese.  Indeed, The Kindred Spirits Supper Club is set in the Wisconsin Dells and as such celebrates all the decadent eats that America's Dairyland has to offer.  But this culinary rom com isn't all cheddar and spiked ice cream.  It's also about something deeper. 

Home for the first time in a long time, journalist Sabrina Monroe is struggling.  Unemployed and in debt, she's forced to move in with her parents and take a job with her high school bully.  Anyone would find this situation trying, but for Sabrina, it's an emotional minefield.  That's because she suffers from social anxiety.  Talking to people is so fraught with stress that she goes out of her way to avoid it.  Her only friend is Molly, a glamorous ghost who used to work in a candy-shop-slash-speakeasy.  

"Um, what?," you may be thinking.  "This chick can't make small talk in a grocery store but clicks with someone last alive when Pink Squirrels were illegal?"  Yep.  But Molly is an innocuous spirit, like the ones on that delightful CBS sitcom Ghosts.  In fact, she's much nicer and more accepting than the people on Earth, and that's more than enough for Sabrina.  That's precisely why she evades the attentions of handsome supper club owner Ray Jasper (and no, that's not just me being cute; apparently, supper clubs are a thing).  When Sabrina and Ray meet in the crossfire of a waterpark food fight, Ray is instantly smitten.  Sabrina feels it too but can't risk getting close to Ray.  Even if he is patient and kind and makes the best fried cheese curds in the greater Great Lakes area.

To me, the most interesting thing about this story isn't the romance or even the ghosts.  It's how Sabrina handles her unique challenges.  So many books are about women trying to balance work and family, or about singles surrounded by girl squads, hitting up parties and juggling suitors.  It was refreshing to read about someone so different, far removed from both of those worlds.  And so it's in that, ahem, spirit, that I share this admittedly spoiler-esque quote: 

"She no longer tracked how long it had been since she'd last spoken to someone, not because she'd found a hidden extrovert inside herself but because it no longer mattered.  She was who she was, and the right people loved her for it." (329)   

I couldn't have said it better myself.  So instead I'll say it with cheese:

Fabulous Felt Cheese Please Barrette

I made this Fabulous Felt Cheese Please Barrette many years ago.  

But as every dell dweller -- and introvert -- knows, cheese only gets better with age.

Also, patience and pasteurization.