JESS JUST READS

A BOOK REVIEW BLOG

Bread Street Kitchen by Gordon Ramsay

Bread Street Kitchen
Gordon Ramsay
December 2016
Hachette Australia

Bread Street Kitchen is a collection of 100 fresh new recipes from Gordon Ramsay and the award-winning team at Bread Street Kitchen. The restaurant itself (and accompanying bar) are set in the heart of London, in the shadow of St Pauls. Their menu is based on fresh seasonal ingredients and relaxed all day dining, and there are now Bread Street Kitchen restaurants in Dubai, Singapore and Hong Kong.

This cookbook features recipes for all occasions: breakfast, lunch, dinner, weekends, sharing, snacking and midweek suppers. Versatile recipes and beautiful imagery fill the pages and there are descriptive, introductory pages for each section. The recipes are new, fresh and simple to cook at home. Most of the recipes are for relaxed, sociable eating, with Crispy Duck Salad, Eggs Piperade and Steak Sandwich being just a few examples from the book.

I found this cookbook beautiful and really easy to use. I love that all recipes had photographs accompanied beside them, and that all of the instructions were clear and easy to follow. Personally, I think Gordon Ramsay has a tendency to include too many ingredients. For most of the recipes I cooked from this book, I ended up dropping off a few things from the list and the food still tasted fantastic. Since this book is promoting a relaxed, easygoing feel, I think the recipes should’ve included fewer ingredients. Some of the ingredients are also quite expensive, so one meal can be quite pricey. Perhaps too pricey for people who are just cooking for themselves or are on a budget.

Some of the other recipes in the book include Ricotta Hotcakes with Honeycomb butter, Seat Trout with Clarms, and Slow Roast Pork Belly with Apple and Cinnamon Sauce. One of the recipes I cooked (and loved!) was the Butterflied Chicken Breasts from page 194:

Bread Street Kitchen has cooking options for everyone, for every meal of the week. I particularly loved the midweek suppers section, with quite a few seafood, red meat and chicken options. The instructions are detailed and lengthy, which look daunting at first but become incredibly helpful when cooking. The photographs are artistic and beautiful and the book includes recipes for some everyday meals you wouldn’t expect in a Gordon Ramsay cookbook, for example Shepherd’s Pie and Brownies. I recommend this cookbook for readers who are looking for versatility and meals for every occasion, but also those of you who are looking for recipes that you can experiment with or will challenge you.

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

Born A Crime
Trevor Noah
December 2016
Hachette Publishers Australia

Trevor Noah is the host of The Daily Show in the United States and has just published his memoir Born a Crime, documenting his life in South Africa under apartheid and then the country’s entry into a post-apartheid era in the 1990s.

The title of the book comes from the illegality of his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. As a result, Trevor was kept indoors for the early years of his life, his mother going to extreme efforts to hide him from a government that could steal him away. Eventually, South Africa was liberated of the tyrannical white rule and Trevor and his mother lived openly and freely.

“The only time I could be with my father was indoors…if we left the house, he’d have to walk across the street from us.”

Born a Crime is comprised of eighteen personal essay chapters, each prefaced by a short piece explaining an element of the apartheid in South Africa. Most of the chapters focus on Trevor’s relationship with his mother, who is smart, bold, brash and did the best job she could raising him and keeping him safe from harm.

“We waited and waited for a minibus to come by. Under apartheid the government provided no public transportation for blacks, but white people still needed us to show up to mop their floors and clean their bathrooms.”

Trevor’s memoir is compelling and inspiring but also comical and entertaining. He reflects on his caterpillar dinners and that time he was thrown from a moving car during an attempted kidnapping. He also spent a week in jail because he didn’t want his mother to know what he’d done. Trevor had a lively childhood and many chapters will make the reader laugh. By high school, he had become entrepreneurial, copying and selling pirated CDs to classmates and also standing in line at the cafeteria and to make a profit from students’ orders.

There is also a darkness to Born a Crime. When he was an adolescent, his mother married an auto mechanic Abel, whose Tsonga name Ngisaveni translates to ‘Be Afraid’. At times, he is caring and compassionate, but other times he is highly controlling and violent. Trevor and his mother became the victims of domestic violence and no matter how hard Trevor tried to convince his mother to leave, she always came back, fearful of what Abel would do to the family. Additionally, every time she went to the police with her complaints, the police would laugh it off as silly marriage issues and wouldn’t charge Abel.

In the end, Abel shot Trevor’s mother in the back of the head in a fit of rage. She survived, miraculously, but Abel was not charged. Even though Abel and Trevor’s mother are now divorced, even now after all these years he lives a few streets away from her. Born a Crime is as much a story about Trevor’s mother as it is about Trevor. She’s a courageous, resilient woman who worked hard to give Trevor the life that he deserved and to give him the skills to succeed in life.

I really enjoyed reading Born a Crime. It’s well-written and reflective, but also fast-paced and heartbreaking. It not only tells the story of Trevor’s childhood, but it highlights his mother and her role in his life. The book exposes the absurd and damaging apartheid and the historical significance of its liberation. Born a Crime was a great read and I have a whole new level of respect for Trevor (and his mum!) after having read the memoir.

Thank you to Hachette for sending me a review copy of this title in exchange for an honest review.

Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult

Small Great Things
Jodi Picoult
October 2016
Allen & Unwin

Small Great Things is the latest page-turner from Jodi Picoult and explores racism in the United States. Ruth Jefferson is a labour and delivery nurse at a Connecticut hospital with more than twenty years’ experience. During her shift, Ruth begins a routine checkup on a newborn, only to be told a few minutes later that she’s been reassigned to another patient. The parents are white supremacists and don’t want Ruth, who is African-American, to touch their child. The hospital complies with their request, but the next day, the baby goes into cardiac distress while Ruth is alone in the nursery. Ruth hesitates before performing CPR, the baby dies, and then Ruth is charged with negligent homicide.

Jodi Picoult has written another courtroom drama with a heart-wrenching plot. She tackles racism, prejudice and justice with incredible prose and it really feels timely that this book was published around the time of the 2016 Presidential Election.

The book explores racial prejudice through three perspectives: Ruth, the black nurse charged with the murder of the baby; Kennedy McQuarrie, Ruth’s white public defender who doesn’t consider herself to be racist but does unknowingly harbour racial biases; and Turk, the white supremacist whose son Davis died unexpectedly.

Small Great Things is told from these three different points of view and together, they all offer different angles on the events. Jodi has crafted this novel with depth and insight and an incredible amount of research. The book is rich with relationships, family and societal relations.

At no point was I bored when reading Small Great Things. Jodi’s books are always lengthy, but I always read them at incredible speed, desperate to get to the end and find out how the story will conclude. Jodi really has perfected her formula. She always alternates between point of view in order to give different opinions on whichever matter she is exploring (in this case, racism), and morality and tough choices usually play a significant part in the novels she writes. Additionally, her novels always have a suspenseful plot, three-dimensional characters and a brisk rhythm.

Kennedy – over the course of the novel – must come to terms with her white privilege. She realises, for the first time, that she does have racial biases and she acknowledges the pervasiveness of American racism. Turk, who is a loving father and husband but horrendously racist, forms one of the strongest elements of the book. Jodi has captured his beliefs and attitudes so well and he really jumps off the page. You don’t hate him as much as you hate his wife, who is the true racist of the book, but he is loathsome. And yet, Jodi has illustrated him in a way that we at times sympathise for him. He has lost his son and he is losing his wife. With flashbacks and reminiscient paragraphs, we learn his past – how he met and fell in love with Brit and the path that brought him to hate.

“I was writing to my own community…who can very easily point to a neo-Nazi skinhead and say he’s a racist… but who can’t recognise racism in themselves.”
-Jodi Picoult in her author’s note

In the author note at the end of book, Jodi acknowledges that she’s always wanted to write a book about racism in America but never felt like it was her story to tell. She did a lot of research prior to starting this novel, talking to a range of people including women of colour and skinheads. Jodi has taken her research and created yet another amazing novel – it may even be her best novel to date.

Harmless Like You by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

Harmless Like You
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
September 2016
Hachette Publishers
Literary Fiction

Harmless Like You is a dual POV literary fiction novel by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan. We’re introduced to Japanese-American Yuki in 1968 when she is 16 years old and has not one friend in New York City. Her parents have moved back to Tokyo and she decides to stay and live with her friend, aspiring model Odile. The book alternates to the year 2016, where gallery owner Jay – whose father has recently died – is accepting his role as a new father. He believes that he is a happily married man, but it’s the year that he will finally confront his mother Yuki, who abandoned their family when he was two years old.

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan explores the blurred boundary between love and pain, selfishness and sacrifice. This novel highlights that the meaning of ‘home’ is complicated and that by starving for a sense of connection, our main character Yuki has actually detached herself from her roots. She’s strayed so far from what she envisioned herself being, that the sacrifices she made almost seem to have been made without real intention to do so. Yuki does not seem to be in control of herself, and she does not seem able to climb out of the painful hole that she finds herself in when she enters an abusive relationship. She is also a deeply lonely character who strives for artistic fulfilment.

“He deposited the bag on the table. Silently, he bent, picking up pages, stacking them, smoothing the edges of the manuscript. He came right to her, still silent, and eased the last sheet from between her fingers, tapped the pile three times, and dropped it back in the drawer. The drawer clattered as he punched it shut. He crouched, eyes level with Yuki’s. He hit her – not hard, but she was unprepared. She fell, landing on the point of her elbow. Her limbs went loose. She slid across the floor. His nail had caught her lip and she tasted blood. Out the window, she saw aeroplane trails. And she didn’t move. She lay and watched them decay.”

Harmless Like You explores the notion that children can inherit identity from their parents. Pain travels through the generations in this novel. Jay, having been abandoned by his mother when he was two years old, is finding fatherhood travelling and his marriage even more so. He loves his wife, but he is not attentive or present, much like his mother Yuki.

“I think the real cowards are the ones over there killing harmless little girls like you”

This novel is unflinchingly honest and captures some of the ugliest aspects of life that a person can experience. Harmless Like You highlights the messier side of life – both Yuki and Jay struggle with fidelity, and at one point, Jay wonders if he loves his child at all. He wonders what it would be like if he just dropped her.

Both characters are looking for fulfilment in life, and this resulted in Yuki abandoning her child. It seems like Jay is thinking the same thing. By delving into Yuki’s past, we come to understand her as a character and the need she has for artistic fulfilment, and how that trumps her being a parent to Jay. The separate stories from her life allow the reader to see why she left her husband and son and why she never came back.

Harmless Like You is an elegant and moving novel that explores the difficulty of life, love and family. It’s extremely well-written and beautifully eloquent and Rowan leaves more unsaid that said. The reader comes to understand the complicated relationships between parents and children, and how actions can cause unintended consequences.

Carry On by Rainbow Rowell

Rainbow Rowell is an author who has such a long backlist of critically acclaimed books that I’ve been trying to find time to read. Her 2013 young adult novel Eleanor and Park was one of my favourite novels of that year, and Carry On tackles some really necessary and age appropriate themes for a young adult novel.

Carry On is about Simon Snow, aka the worst chosen one to have ever been chosen. He is returning to Watford, a magical school in England for his eighth and final year. And over the first few months of his final schooling year, he is forced to come to terms with himself as the Chosen One, destined to defeat the Insidious Humdrum – a creature creating magical Dead Spots all over England. Additionally, Simon is forced to befriend his nemesis and roommate Baz (who he’s fairly certain is a vampire and is trying to kill him) and has agreed to help Baz determine the cause of his mother’s death, who was the previous headmistress at Watford before the current Mage was instated.

The novel is very refreshing – it’s a witty and wildy fun story. It’s told through several narrative voices, including Simon, his roommate Baz, his friend Penelope, and his girlfriend Agatha. Simon and Penelope’s friendship reminded me a lot of Hermione and Harry’s friendship in Harry Potter.

I was sceptical at first because it sounded like an eerily similar plot to Harry Potter, but Rainbow was able to take a premise and a cast of characters and present them in a unique way. She did a marvellous job of crafting her own magical world using shared elements from Harry Potter and other novels set in magic schools.

Carry On begins after Simon has already spent seven years at this school. So the reader really is thrown into the story and for the first fifty pages, they feel like they don’t understand what’s happening. But that’s the appeal of the novel. You miss that first few years of schooling year where Simon meets all of the other students and bonds with his friends, and you simply find out about previous events from passing comments by the characters. It means the reader is really engaged in the story, but it also provides a lot of comic relief.

Simon is a fantastic protagonist. His girlfriend has just broken up with him, and he doesn’t really have any special magical ability – half of the time, he can’t even make his wand work. He seems a little lost, and unsure, and he’s constantly worried about Baz’s next prank or trick that could get Simon killed. It’s a comedy of errors for Simon, and it’s a series of hilarious plot points for the reader.

The relationship between each of the characters is wonderful. The dialogue is realistic and hilarious, and quite early on in the book Rainbow drops in a major twist that I didn’t anticipate. This is a spoiler-free review so I won’t say it, but Rainbow Rowell really has a way of writing books that you want to read in one sitting because they effortlessly draw you in. She’s a master at crafting three dimensional characters with raw, moving stories and motives that make the reader relate to them.

Rainbow tackles many themes in the novel that are highly necessary for its teenage readership. Two characters in the book are coming to terms with their homosexuality, and Simon of course is trying to understand his role in this magical world (considering he doesn’t really seem to have that much magical ability). This novel pays homage to the Harry Potter series through its structure and plot progression. Both books are set in the United Kingdom and Watford seems to resemble Hogwarts in many ways.

Rainbow Rowell weaves magical fairytale and romance into one story, and before you know it, you’ve read the 600+ page book a lot quicker than you originally thought possible. Carry On is a love story, but also an entertaining young adult novel with lots of mystery. It’s charming, delightful, poignant, laugh-out-loud and just a wonderful read. Rainbow has created warm, fun, complex characters; if you loved Harry Potter and you’re looking for something that feels similar, Carry On comes highly recommended.

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