The Glass Kitchen
by Linda Francis Lee
Cutting to the chase: I recommend The Glass Kitchen, but only when you’re in the mood for it. If you’ve just finished a beach read you hated, or the ending of your last family drama was too “Hallmark” and you’re craving a meaty drama, hold on to this one until next spring. It’s a very cute book, but it’s sweet enough to give you a cavity.
The main character in The Glass Kitchen has magical cooking powers. She gets a vision in her head of a meal, and she obsesses about it until she makes it. Then, something important happens. For example, as a young girl, she imagined a meal, prepared it for her and her grandmother, but only set the table for one instead of two. Just as dinner was ready, her grandmother died. After that, it’s no wonder she wanted to stay away from cooking!
As a grown woman, she’s moved away from her family’s small Southern town and created a completely different life for herself in New York City. That life is crumbling apart, though, and her sisters encourage her to start a restaurant as part of her new chapter. Her neighbor is an incredibly handsome—of course—widower with a troubled daughter, and ever since their first meeting, she’s started having visions of food again. . .
As you can tell, it’s a little trite. It’s a lot of fun, though, reading about the different meals and what life events they bring about. The book is separated into sections: appetizer, entre, etc., which is also pretty cute. There were certain scenes that made me roll my eyes and put the book down for a while, but as long as you’re expecting that going in, you’ll be fine. Of all the “magical cooking” books out there, I recommend this one because it still has a slight grip on reality. If you want to look at it realistically, you can make the argument that the main character doesn’t have magical powers but instead has a craving to create beautiful food, and her intense energy behind the cooking coincides with incidents that make her believe the two are linked.
The main character in The Glass Kitchen has magical cooking powers. She gets a vision in her head of a meal, and she obsesses about it until she makes it. Then, something important happens. For example, as a young girl, she imagined a meal, prepared it for her and her grandmother, but only set the table for one instead of two. Just as dinner was ready, her grandmother died. After that, it’s no wonder she wanted to stay away from cooking!
As a grown woman, she’s moved away from her family’s small Southern town and created a completely different life for herself in New York City. That life is crumbling apart, though, and her sisters encourage her to start a restaurant as part of her new chapter. Her neighbor is an incredibly handsome—of course—widower with a troubled daughter, and ever since their first meeting, she’s started having visions of food again. . .
As you can tell, it’s a little trite. It’s a lot of fun, though, reading about the different meals and what life events they bring about. The book is separated into sections: appetizer, entre, etc., which is also pretty cute. There were certain scenes that made me roll my eyes and put the book down for a while, but as long as you’re expecting that going in, you’ll be fine. Of all the “magical cooking” books out there, I recommend this one because it still has a slight grip on reality. If you want to look at it realistically, you can make the argument that the main character doesn’t have magical powers but instead has a craving to create beautiful food, and her intense energy behind the cooking coincides with incidents that make her believe the two are linked.