A memoir of life in Cambodia (and Vietnam and
Thailand). So much death—so much starving—and even when hope was gone, they
managed to survive and, eventually, thrive. Painful to read but not unbearable
because of the tiny sliver of hope she sustains through memories of her
mother’s recipes.
A lot of the recipes are included in the book (22 or so), but it’s definitely not a recipe book. It’s just a lovely memoir of a woman who survived by helping others.
The cucumbers, which were struggling to find the trellis to climb on, decided to climb on the Jalapeno Peppers instead. After I extracted the vines from the jalapenos and poked them through holes in the fence wire trellis, I noticed a few tiny inch-long cucumbers in the making. I was pleased--some, in a few days or a week--I'd have cucumbers in my salad!
Only later did I look down at the bottom on the fence wire and find these monsters. (The cherry tomato is there to indicate scale.)
They taste okay, but how can one person eat even one of these? Wow.
The cucumbers escaped their wire fencing and attacked the jalapenos. But the jalapenos appear to be fighting back!
This is just about half of all the peppers I got off only three plants.
My cucumbers have some enormous leaves! Not started climbing up their fence yet, but it's waiting for them.
What a strange, strange book. At halfway point I was raving about how great this was—full of plots and subplots and mystery underneath the adventures of a young woman who is taken in by a couple of her dead sister’s friends after an explosion destroys the shop she was working at. Just as she was about to leave it, because “they” (the mysterious they) were getting too close.
I hope that didn’t give away too much. I’m afraid to explain why I didn’t like the ending because that would definitely spill some serious beans. But I didn’t hate the ending, either, so I’ve recommend this book wholeheartedly. It’s in the YA category, but very enjoyable for an adult. It’s told in flashbacks from her various foster homes, interspersed with flash-forwards to current time. But I didn’t find the discontinuity at all annoying—it was done beautifully.
By Andrew Cotter
Very amusing little account of the author’s mountain hikes with and without his two Labradors, and its interruption by the Covid pandemic and shutdowns thereof. It appears—although that’s not the subject of the book—that during the pandemic he turned from covering sports events to filming and posting sporting event parodies starring his two dogs. But his book is more about his various climbing adventures with them.
Don’t expect anything deep or revealing, but just a heartening reminder of why we love dogs so much and they, inexplicably, love us more. Even when we drag them out on long, cold hikes. In the snow. (Which they love)
Everyone should read this book now. And maybe read it twice. Or even put it on a regular rotation—say, once per year. It’s short so that’s not going to take up too much of your time. Oh, but what it will take of your thinking!
Taking the humble serviceberry as an example, Ms. Kimmerer roams to economics and examples of how small local solutions can bring on very much happiness. Because, as she says, and we should all know, an economic system based on ever increasing growth, ever-increasing depletion of finite resources, is doomed to fail. “…it is an engine of extinction.”
And she gives lot of little examples of how we can progress beyond that fallacy and eventually arrive at an economy based on mutual respect and reciprocity.
On top of all that “philosophizing”, she writes some heart-achingly beautiful prose. It’s just lovely, like all her writings. (Except the gut-wrenching ones.)
