Monday, December 26, 2016

BOOK REVIEW: Shadowboxing by Anne Barwell - BONUS RECIPE: Thai Mango Sweet Rice with Pomegranate Sauce

This World War II novel appears to be the first in what will be a series of books based upon the struggle of brilliant scientist Kristopher Lehrer to stay alive, and, with the help of a closely knit group of Resistance members, reach Allied forces.  A chance meeting with a former lover, David Reuben, inadvertently discloses that his scientific research is intended to be used by the Nazis as a weapon for mass destruction.  Kristopher, ethical and moral, is torn between the beliefs of his Nazi father and the need to protect human life, represented in his sister, a physician.
Kristopher inadvertently kills his mentor, Dr. Kluge, during a confrontation about the research.  His only choice is to reach Allied forces before he is captured by the Nazis and forced to provide the final pieces preventing completion of the weapon.
Various relationships are highlighted between the members of the resistance, including the burgeoning love between Kristopher and the man in charge of keeping him alive. The characters lack empathetic dimension, and the book ends a bit abruptly. Overall, not a bad read for lovers of historical LGBT fiction.
Review first published in The Historical Novel Review
 
BONUS RECIPE
Thai Mango Sweet Rice with Pomegranate Sauce
Ingredients:
  1. Place the sticky rice on a serving dish. Arrange the mangos on top of the rice. Pour the sauce over the mangos and rice. Sprinkle with fresh mint and sesame seeds.



Friday, November 25, 2016

BOOK REVIEW: Our Family Dreams by Daniel Blake Smith - BONUS RECIPE: Holiday Mince Tartlettes

This is a multigenerational saga beginning in the Revolutionary era, and extending to the late 19th century. The book is not as much an immigration story – the family patriarch Jesse is already 6th-generation American when the story opens on his struggling farm in Vermont – but a migration story. We watch the very different experiences of his children as they take difficult journeys to start lives in various areas of the burgeoning United States.
New England farming was a notoriously difficult lifestyle. Notable among the experiences of Jesse’s children is that of Elijah, who moves to Virginia and marries into a genteel Southern plantation family, in contrast to his brother Calvin, who chooses a career as a lawyer and banker in Indiana.
Many facets of the story resonate with modern experiences: Elijah’s struggle to raise Southern sons who are lazy and entitled, spoiled by slave servitude; the speculative land bubble created by easy bank credit in 1837. Most notable is the saga of granddaughter Indiana Fletcher, who bequeaths her home to found Sweet Briar College in Virginia.
The book can be hard-going for the casual reader, structured as an academic study of contemporary letters, but the important themes ring out: the melancholic quality of life in the early United States despite almost limitless opportunity; education as a socioeconomic brass ring. Most surprising perhaps is the deep well of insecurity behind much of the upward-reaching behavior we normally attribute to American “exceptionalism.” A compelling read for students of the era.
First published in the Historical Novel Review


BONUS RECIPE: Holiday Mince Tarts
1¼ lb mincemeat (add 1cup dried apricots, 1/2 cup candied pineapple, zest of one orange, 1/2 tsp peppermint and 1/2 tsp almond extract all finely processed)

12 oz plain flour
3 oz lard
3 oz butter
pinch of salt
Powdered sugar for sprinkling
Make up the pastry by sifting the flour and salt into a mixing bowl and rubbing the fats into it until the mixture resembles fine crumbs. Then add just enough cold water to mix to a dough that leaves the bowl clean.
Leave the pastry to rest in a plastic bag in the refrigerator for 20-30 minutes, then roll half of it out as thinly as possible and cut it into two dozen 3 inch rounds, gathering up the scraps and re-rolling.
Then do the same with the other half of the pastry, this time using the 2½ inch cutter.
Grease 24 small muffin tins lightly and line them with the larger rounds. Fill these with mincemeat to the level of the edges of the pastry. Dampen the edges of the smaller rounds of pastry with water and press them lightly into position to form lids, sealing the edges.
Brush each one with milk and make three snips in the tops with a pair of scissors. Bake near the top of the oven for 25-30 minutes until light golden brown.
Cool on a wire tray and sprinkle with icing sugar.
When cool, store in an airtight container

Friday, November 4, 2016

BOOK REVIEW: The Sky Over Lima by Juan Gomez Barcena - BONUS RECIPE: Pesto Cencioni with Roast Peppers and Kale


An amusing true story of catfishing before its time, The Sky over Lima takes place in 1914 Peru, where we meet two young law students, Jose Galvez and Carlos Rodriguez, sons of very different but equally wealthy families. Erstwhile starving poets and Bohemian free spirits, the pair is frustrated by the boredom of family prestige and obligation, as well as admittedly mediocre poetic abilities.
Enter the hoax. In an effort to access the fresh work of the famous Nobel laureate, Juan Ramón Jimenez, the boys concoct for him a fictitious pen pal named Georgina Hubner, a beautiful woman who seduces Jimenez from afar, obtaining an unpublished copy of his poetry. The joke soon takes on a life of its own. The letters become more and more intimate and passionate, as they impart Georgina with personality and living identity; and her epistolary becomes a novel of its own. In the liberating anonymity, the young men learn as much about life and literature as they do about themselves.
Gómez Bárcena’s debut novel offers a unique voice, framed in short chapters, each leveraging the tone and tension of the last. The historical and cultural touches are vibrant, making the city of Lima and its people a character in itself. We look forward to more from this author.
Review first published in the Historical Novel Review


BONUS RECIPE:

Pesto Cencioni with Roast Peppers and Sautéed Kale
 
 
For the pesto:

3 cups packed fresh basil leaves  
4 cloves garlic (preferably roasted)
3/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese  
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil  
1/4 cup pine nuts, freshly toasted until just browned in a dry pan over low heat 
1 tsp. ground black pepper 
Juice of 2 fresh lemons

Combine all ingredients in the bowl of a food processor or blender. Blend to a smooth paste.
 
 
For the pasta:

1 lb. box of dried Cencioni
2 red bell peppers, roasted black over direct flame, seeded, peeled, juice preserved
1/2 pound fresh curly kale leaves, stems torn out and discarded
1/4 cup veal or chicken stock (or substitute white wine)
2 TBS extra virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste

Boil Cencioni until just done, according to instructions on package. This is a large, thick pasta and cooking times vary.
Meanwhile cut peppers into strips and sauté in olive oil with kale over medium heat until kale is just wilted. Deglaze with stock or wine and reserved pepper juice.
Toss cooked Cencioni with pesto, plate, then top with kale and pepper mixture. Adjust seasonings to taste. Red pepper flakes may be added for extra heat if desired.

Pairs well with a fruity Riesling.


 

Sunday, October 30, 2016

BOOK REVIEW: Hard Red Spring by Kelly Kerney - BONUS RECIPE: Pumpkin Tortellini with Mint Gastrique


An epic historical novel in the tradition of Norman Mailer and Ken Follett. Chronicling nearly a century of American involvement in Guatemala, Hard Red Spring erupts with authenticity. Beginning in 1902 with the disappearance of the daughter of murdered American farmers, little Evie’s story and influence play out across generations of commercial and religious missionary culture, and highlight the inevitability of Guatemalan life, belief and politics.
We are carried forward to 1954 and an era of direct American interventionism, as the wife of the U. S. Ambassador becomes pregnant by her best friend’s husband. The story then follows a Christian evangelist in the late ’80s, and the return of a young mother and her adopted war-orphan daughter near the end of the millennium. A sense of desperation pervades the book, but throughout, the common denominator is the silent witness of the native Maya: stoic, mystical, fundamentally unchanged by their absorption of the blood, tears, betrayal, and even the seed of their North American would-be overlords.
Richly styled, definitively researched, the book is everything the thoughtful reader of historical fiction could hope for. Enthusiastically recommended.
Review first published in The Historical Novel Review


BONUS RECIPE
Hand-cut Pumpkin Tortellini with Roasted Garlic and Mint Gastrique

For the Pasta:
2 cups flour
1/3 cup pumpkin pie filling
3 egg yolks
1/4 teaspoon salt
Water (a few teaspoons if needed)

Process and knead together to a non-sticky dough.
Roll out on a floured surface to 1/8th inch or thinner.
Cut into 3" to 4" squares.
Spoon up to 1Tablespoon of filling into center, if desired (consider more pumpkin filling, cinnoman ricotta, or cooked ground lamb with seasoned breadcrumbs).
Fold into triangles, pinch edges to seal, circle "arms" and press together.
Cook in large amount of boiling water for 4 minutes and drain immediately.

For the gastrique:
1 cup fresh picked mint leaves plus more chopped for garnish
2 cloves garlic (preferably roasted)
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil (best available)
1 Tablespoon white vinegar
1 Tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
Pinch white pepper to taste

Blend all or mortar well. Squeeze or spoon under and over Tortellini.
Garnish with more chopped mint and grated Parmesan. Serves 3-5.






Saturday, October 15, 2016

BOOK REVIEW: Scarpia by Piers Paul Read

Scarpia BY PIERS PAUL READ Best known for Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, Read reprises his renowned journalistic style in his latest novel. Set in the late 18th century, Scarpia is a riff on Puccini’s Tosca, described by Read as the original work of an “anti-clerical Frenchman,” whose “calumny” it is his purpose to redress. No surprise there. As an English Catholic, the enthusiasm Read radiates for this opportunity to defend the papacy while slamming the French is guiltily charming. Scarpia is a villainous character in the opera, showcased in an ethereal duet with Tosca where he deceives her into betraying her tortured Jacobin lover. Read re-imagines him from childhood: son of a disenfranchised Sicilian noble, a reckless military career leaves Scarpia in the service of church benefactors and a rich Roman wife. After a chance dalliance with Tosca, the rock-star soprano of her time, Scarpia flees Rome to avoid Napoleon’s army. The Pope is dethroned, and Scarpia’s wife misbehaves quite publicly. When fortunes reverse, Scarpia returns to serve, unwillingly, as Rome’s chief enforcer, ordered to root out Republican sentiment. The climax is known, and the entire opera is compressed into the last chapter. Scarpia’s motives are not only vindicated – a conflict of loyalty and Catholic guilt – but Read reworks the very storyline. A cheat, perhaps, but Scarpia is not meant to be fan fiction. Read is at his best when applying his skilled realism to deep dive character study. He fails only, perhaps, by rendering Puccini irrelevant. Most fascinating is the omniscient voice of the confessional: the ability of priestly characters to divine the cross-currents of human motive while ignoring their own bias. In it we imagine echoes of Read’s own conscience. A worthy read. First published in Historical Novel Review

Thursday, October 13, 2016

BOOK REVIEW: The Attempt by Magdalena Platzova - BONUS RECIPE: Tagliatelle with Broccoli Rabe and Venison Sausage

The Attempt BY ALEX ZUCKER (TRANS.), MAGDALÉNA PLATZOVÁ
The English edition of Czech author Platzová’s latest novel is a condensed and masterful example of experimental literary fiction with historical roots: a nesting of contemporary and generational storylines, epistolary and narrative, personal, political, and social perspective, in the tradition of Prus, Kundera, and Vonnegut. In the wake of a failed marriage, journalist Jan Schwarzer relocates from Prague to New York City during the height of the Occupy Wall Street movement. He is there ostensibly to write a book on the pre-war assassination attempt of a U.S industrialist by an anarchist writer who may, or may not, be his ancestor. But as he investigates, interviews the magnate’s surviving descendants, and pores through the correspondence of the jailed shooter and his lovers and friends, the event foreshadows much deeper interconnections: his personal longings, political mood, the despair and disparity of his own life and time. The politics are murky, and those looking for pure anti-capitalist polemic will be disappointed. But helpless disappointment with political ideals and their aftermath is a core motif – compare the affective tableau of Milan Kundera’s post-war Eastern Europe. Platzová paints a contemporary New York of neo-Bohemian values, slowly, but finally inheriting the sense of lost grandeur long native to European urbanity. Her writing style is varied, sparing, insightful, and at times nothing short of poetic. Enthusiastically recommended.

Review first published in The Historical Novel Review


BONUS RECIPE: Tagliatelle with Broccoli Rabe and Venison Sausage

1 lb. Broccoli Rabe, cleaned and rough cut
1 box Tagliatelli
1/2 lb. sweet venison sausage, crumbled
4  cloves fresh garlic, finely minced
1 tsp. red pepper flakes (or to taste)
1 tsp. salt (large pinch more for pasta water)
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
1 1/2 cups veal stock
Good parmesan cheese
Half a lemon

Boil the pasta in a large pot of salted water until almost al dente.
Meanwhile, in a large high-sided sauté pan, sauté the sausage over medium heat until crisp, strain, set aside, and preserve the rendered fat.
To the fat add the olive oil, lower heat, add garlic and red pepper, simmering until the garlic barely begins to brown (do not burn the garlic!). Turn heat up to high and add veal stock.
When pasta has one minute left to cook, strain and add to the sauté, and toss broccoli rabe into still boiling pasta water. Stir the pasta in the sauté pan until most of the stock and oil has been absorbed. After three minutes, remove, strain, and quickly cool the broccoli rabe (an ice water bath works best) to preserve the bright green color. Add to the sauté, mix all, and plate in a large bowl. Finish with lemon and sprinkle with grated parmesan to taste.  Pairs well with a good Chianti Classico.

Friday, October 7, 2016

BOOK REVIEW: Rochester Knockings by Hubert Haddad

Rochester Knockings: A Novel of the Fox Sisters BY HUBERT HADDAD
In a laudable project for the University of Rochester’s press, Haddad combines high literary style and unity of effect in this believable and engrossing historical journey. Set at the beginning of the late 19th-century Spiritualist movement in Western New York, coinciding in time and origin with the broader religious Great Awakening which swept the country, the book presents a meticulously researched tableau. The historical Fox sisters –Margaret, Kate, and the much older Leah – interact with the spectral causes of mysterious rappings in their home. Their seeming ability to communicate with spirits launches them to overnight acclaim. Their later confession to fraud is well known, but Haddad imagines a rich inner life in the youngest sister, Kate, which persists in the reader’s mind, just as the Spiritualist movement itself persists today, contrary to common reason. Her anxiety, as the family moves house three times during her childhood, evokes widespread beliefs in the connection of pre-teen angst to psychokinetic phenomena. But it is the book’s resonance with the zeitgeist of our own era that is most compelling. Western New York at the time was a crossroads culturally, religiously and economically. It was a gateway for immigration of European peasants to the rich lands of the Ohio Valley and the West, and the children of its earlier settlers felt disenfranchised. Notable is the character of Marshall McLean as a sort of mediator cum observer of the mix of these influences with Canadian, native, Mormon, and other religious splinter groups. Strongly recommended. Review first published in the Historical Novel Review

Monday, October 3, 2016

BOOK REVIEW: Ophelia's War by Alison L. McLennan

Ophelia’s War: The Secret Story of a Mormon Turned Madam

Ophelia’s War tells the riveting life story of Ophelia Oatman, an orphaned Mormon girl coming of age and fighting for physical and spiritual survival on the 19th-century Utah frontier. Ophelia is at once heartbreakingly vulnerable and heroic as she battles exploitation and abandonment to preserve her social identity and mixed family legacy. At the story’s core is her long-hidden ruby necklace, both treasure and burden. It will ultimately prove to be her very personal salvation.
Each chapter is a jewel in itself, threading through the barren landscape like told beads, presenting a fascinating array of characters: Ophelia’s abusive Uncle Luther, a riverboat gambler; Pearl Kelly, infamous Madam; and the astonishing lone Native woman who saves Ophelia’s life when she is left to die in the desert. Ophelia is an existentialist champion, who navigates all hazards thrown her way, refusing to be victimized. McLennan’s style is reminiscent of Hemingway in its demonstrative elegance, and her historical realism is flawless.
A truly compelling novel of moral exile and self-redemption. Enthusiastically recommended.

Review first published in the Historical Novel Review