Reviewer Sandra Shwayder Sanchez: Sandra is
a retired attorney and co-founder of a small non-profit publishing
collective: The Wessex Collective with whom she has published two short fiction collections
(A Mile in These Shoes and Three Novellas) and one
novel, Stillbird.
Her most recent novel, The Secret of A Long Journey is soon to be released by Floricanto Press in April 2012 and her first novel, The Nun, originally published by Plain View Press in 1992 is being reissued in a 2nd Edition with additional material by PVP in March 2012.
Click Here To Purchase The Kitchen Daughter
Author: Jael McHenry
Publisher: Gallery
Books
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9169-9
Promotional materials
say that the central question of this novel is “what does it mean
to be normal?” As someone who doesn’t have a clue what “normal”
means I was pleased that the author seeks to define “normal” in a
manner that includes all kinds of people. The primary character,
Ginny Selvaggio, takes a little getting used to but she grows on
you.
The premise is that she is afflicted with a “syndrome”
known as Aspergers but when asked by others what she “has” she
responds : “A Personality.” Go Ginny.
The book deals
with how people, namely Ginny, her sister Amanda, family friend Gert
and Gert’s son Daniel deal with the untimely deaths of loved ones.
For Ginny coping means cooking. Ginny loves to cook. She likes
the structure of recipes and has an obsessive compulsive’s
attention to minute details that help her identify and savor every
taste combined within them. The other thing that begins to happen in
the kitchen after her parents are killed in a car crash is the
appearance of ghosts. When Ginny follows the recipes left by dead
people, mother, grandmother, an unknown woman named Evangeline,
and follows them perfectly, the smells of the foods bring forth the
ghosts, briefly and apparently only once, so as she figures out how
this works she realizes she needs to have her questions ready.
No small anxiety there!
Ginny also seeks recipes for
“being normal” in a book she calls “the normal book” with
clippings from newspaper advice columnists and she checks it from
time to time as a guide to how best to assess her own behavior. She
also does research online and in her parents’ library where she
sometimes goes to escape interpersonal encounters she knows she
cannot handle. In a book titled: An Anthropologist on Mars
which she discovers is a collection of essays about people damaged in
various ways, she reads an essay by a woman who has invented for
herself a hugging machine, something to crawl into to feel loved.
Ginny is jealous, averse to touch, she nonetheless needs it. To feel
loved, to calm down, she frequently goes into her parents closet to
feel surrounded by their clothing. So, yes, Ginny suffers but she
also has a get real sense of humor. She looks up a definition of
Aspergers on an online site which lists various symptoms
including this one:
A tendency to obsess on particular topics that
may not be of interest to others, she is reminded of
“everyone I have ever met” and remembers a boy in kindergarten
who always talked about caterpillars, a girl in 4th grade obsessed
with butterflies and the girl in college who only talked about beer
and sex.
Eventually Gert, A Romanian Jewess from Cuba
who came to Philadelphia where she met Ginny’s mother,
manages to get Ginny out of the closet and out of the house to help
her cook at the Jewish Temple for families who are in mourning. So
cooking does indeed become the way she connects to, instead of
escaping from, other people.
This book could be labeled
“heartbreaking” just as Ginny could be labeled “damaged” but
in truth the book was also uplifting with a realistic blend of sad
and happy endings, and Ginny often made me smile. She definitely has
“personality.”
Click Here To Purchase The Kitchen Daughter