Get Your Okra On, Y'all!

This isn't going to be a cookbook review, so much as it will be a review of the author and the fun event I attended not long ago at Odyssey Bookshop. It's no secret that I'm Southern, and it's also no secret that until recently, okra was a vegetable that was rather hard to come by up here in the Kingdom of the Yankee. Thankfully that is about to change, and I think we can all be grateful to Virginia Willis, author of the new cookbook and cultural/culinary history, Okra. Her new book is getting all kinds of accolades, she is also a displaced Southerner living in my own town, and Virginia has precisely the right kind of persuasive and upbeat disposition to talk our local farm stand into growing more okra.

All the fixin's for an okra martini, including
locally made vodka and pickled okra garnish

My husband and I were already planning on attending the Okra event, but once we heard that Virginia would be pouring okra martinis and serving up some food for us, we were able to enlist some friends to attend, too.  She also demonstrated how to make pickled okra and the little fried okra cornmeal cakes that were delicious.  Better than hushpuppies or cornbread by far, and nothing's better than food served hot off the skillet!

Virginia is a Cordon Bleu-trained chef who loves to incorporate French techniques into traditional Southern cuisine, but for this book, she did research on the cultural history of okra around the world and modified recipes from West Africa, India, the Caribbean, as well as the American south to include in the book.

Seriously, I cannot tell you how good these were.

I've been eating okra for most of my life now, but it wasn't until Virginia's event that I ever sampled it raw, and I just might be a convert.  I like the crunch of raw vegetables, but I've never cared much for their flavor, but okra is pretty mild, and it has a crispness factor similar to sugar snap peas or sweet bell pepper. If it weren't so expensive to buy up here, I might snack on it regularly during the summer months.

Did I mention that she's adorable?

Lots of people don't like okra because of the slimy (or mucilaginous, if you prefer) output that results when it's cut open, but there are ways to avoid it if you wish.  Like deep frying it, which is obviously the best way to eat okra.  OBVIOUSLY. Some dishes, like a traditional gumbo, depend on that same mucilaginous texture to thicken the stew.  I also learned from Virginia that for every culture around the world that grows okra, there's a recipe that pairs tomato with the okra, for the acidity in the tomato cuts down on the slime output. Food science.  It's nifty.

Well, that went down with tolerable ease

I'm not much of a cook myself, but I will do what I can to coax my DH to prepare some of the recipes in this book.  Especially since Virginia gave us the tip to shop at the Asian market in Hadley to find fresh okra year-round!  So basically I'm saying, eat okra, y'all.  It's yummy, it has a venerable tradition, and if you start now, you'll be ahead of the curve.  Okra is gonna be the new arugula and/or the new squash blossoms of 2016.  I can just feel it.

NB: This book was published as part of the Savor the South series from the University of North Carolina Press and DH and I each purchased our own copy to support the author and the event. 

Ode to Everything Nashville

The Parthenon  

Did y'all know that Nashville has its very own Parthenon?  The first time I visited the city (maybe seven or eight years ago), this came as a complete surprise to me. Since the original Parthenon has been shattered by ordnance and the ravages of time, the Nashville replica stands proud.  It may not have all of the architectural wonders and illusions of the original, but at least it does offer visitors a sense of scope.

I mention this because last week my husband I visited Nashville at the behest of Vanderbilt University, whose library had purchased a large collection of my DH's work (alas, not from us but at auction!), and so we journeyed south for a few days. DH taught a couple of micro classes and visited with students in the special collections and in the divinity school, and then he gave a couple of talks, including one in conversation with Ann Patchett.

The view from our hotel room. Too bad we're not football fans! 

Because our schedule was largely driven by our hosts, I really only had a few hours of free time to call my own;  a nasty headcold, in conjunction with the unseasonably cold and rainy weather, contrived to make me want to nap my free time away.  I managed to explore a little, including a visit to Patchett's wonderful bookstore, Parnassus, and a quick stop at an old Union fort from the Civil War.

Parnassus is beautiful, and like all of the best spaces, it combines new and old elements for a timeless and comfortable feel. You'd never guess that the bookstore has only been in place for about three years. It also has hundreds of personal touches, so that even though the store is part of a strip mall, once you step inside, you're a world away from that box-store feel.  I particularly liked the memorial benches down the center of the store: obviously for sitting and reading, but also firmly anchoring this space in a local community.

The memorial benches down the center of the store

One bench was in memory of a loving dog. I just loved that.

Or this piano, which is used to good effect for creating displays in the music section, but is also played during some events--or whenever a small child simply cannot resist the urge.

In the tradition of Narnia, Oz, and Wonderland, the children's department at Parnassus has a special child-sized access point.  I love how it also evokes both the local icon of the Parthenon and the store's own eponym:

Of course I ducked through here

And what bookstore would be complete without a four-legged mascot?

I also love the way that the bookstore augments the standard overhead lighting with unexpected bits of whimsy:

Stars for the children's department

Or these bird fixtures in a non-fiction alcove

Parnassus also offers a small selection of cards.  Most of them are beautifully printed by letterpress, and thus on the pricier side ($5 and up). I was reminded once again that I was in the South when I saw  two rows of cards like these:

I didn't even know they made cards for this!

My visit to Parnassus wouldn't be complete without mentioning the fun staff they had there and my opportunity to chat with Karen Hayes, Patchett's co-owner. I knew her from my days as a bookseller at Lemuria, lo, these many years ago, so we had a late lunch talking books, shop, and travel.  It was also the occasion of my first bento box, so naturally I had to take a picture.

Isn't it beautiful?  And it was only $8.95!

By then there was just time enough for me to take a quick tour of Fort Negley before heading back to the hotel before the lecture that night. I wish I could say that it was amazing, but it wasn't. I suppose I could say it was at least worth the price of admission (it was FREE). I've visited a few forts before, all of which were much older that Ft Negley (by a couple hundred years), so I was definitely expecting more.  Once you've seen any of the old forts in the Caribbean, particularly the two excellent ones in Old San Juan, I suppose most others would be a disappointment.

What I got was a small hill, a view to downtown and a baseball stadium, some crumbly walls that I mostly couldn't get near, and some boardwalks. Oh, and lots of wind and some intermittent drizzle.

Visitors must stick to the paved paths or boardwalks at all times.

A distant stone wall

I think these trees are actually more interesting than the fort itself

In one direction you could semi-visualize what the view might have been like for the Union soldiers defending the fort:

But mostly the fort is encroached on all sides by the city of Nashville.  There's one building in particular that looks like it would be better suited to Gotham:

Can't you just imagine the bat signal emanating from there?

Still, I learned a little bit of history and took a walk that I otherwise wouldn't have taken, so that's a victory in the face of my inherent laziness.

By 3:00, though, my cold was getting the better of me, so I went back to the hotel to get my nap on before dressing for the big lecture that night.  Not much to tell about that, other than it was very entertaining to hear Ann and my DH in conversation about books, reading, e-readers, bookstores, writers, reviewers, publishing, working, discipline, the myth of writers block, and just about any other subject related to the production of a book.

The rest of our time in Nashville was either taken up with university stuff or with family, but DH and I had one evening free for dinner together just the two of us.  Thanks to the help of the Nashville forum on TripAdvisor, we were lucky enough to get a next-day reservation for an early dinner at Chateau West, just up the road from our hotel. We chose wisely, for although the ambience at this new restaurant wasn't a match for Tin Angel, where we had dined with one of the deans earlier in the week, the food was better.

It had been a long time since we had partaken of a full-on French meal, so we made a pact to eat lightly all day on Friday so that we'd have belly room to appreciate the various courses. For an appetizer, DH ordered the escargot and I chose the charcuterie platter because it featured one of my favorite cheeses, St. Andre.  But when our plates arrived, I was promptly filled with food envy: his snails were served in puff pastry.  My charcuterie was good--it could have benefitted from some flatbread or crackers--but the escargot were fabulous:

For our main courses, we had trouble making up our minds but DH eventually settled on the coquilles St. Jacques while I decided on the duck Chambord. Both were dreamy.  His scallops were huge and tender and came with a sweet potato soufflé. The sauce, unlike every other sample of that dish we've had, was not at all heavy (but no doubt still very calorie-laden).  I don't order duck very frequently but I basically did that night because I was skeptical of how Chambord would work with it.  It was amazing.  The potatoes added an earthiness that balanced the sweetness of the sauce perfectly.  I was surprised that I didn't love the sweet potato cake, which was actually too dense to be rightfully called a soufflé, and it was overburdened with nutmeg, a spice I normally love.

Coquilles St Jacques

Duck Chambord

The dessert menu was the piece de resistance. I love dessert and while I will eat almost anything sweet, I will laugh in your face if your restaurant puts on airs about its desserts for offering a cheesecake, a creme brûlée, and a variation of Death By Chocolate.  Puh-leeze. Those are so pedestrian that every major chain restaurant offers those. No, if you want to impress me, you have to do a little better than that.  Chateau West impressed me. We selected a strawberry mille feuille and a hazelnut Paris-Brest.  The former was quite good, and beautiful to boot.  But the latter? It was pure heaven. I'd never heard of a Paris-Brest dessert, but it's a puff pastry with hazelnut cream and it was one of the best things I've ever eaten in my life.

The strawberry mille feuille

The Paris-Brest

I reckon that concludes my trip to Nashville.  I hope I get to visit again with more time to spare, for seeing more sites, eating more good food, and maybe going to hear some live music, which we didn't do at all on this trip.  And, of course, I'd love to have more time for visiting family & friends in the area!

Book Review: The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd

I'm not sure why, but when I heard last year that Sue Monk Kidd would be publishing her novel in January of this year, I wasn't especially excited about it.  I'd read The Secret Life of Bees and liked it pretty well, so I'm uncertain where this feeling of disinterest stemmed from, other than after dissecting Kathryn Stockett's book, The Help,  I was a little leery of another one of those Southern novels where white women become the heroes in the story of black women's struggle. (Full disclosure: I loved The Help but I was fully aware after reading just how much the author had appropriated someone else's story in a not-so-nice way.)

But then I read a review of The Invention of Wings on Alice's blog, Reading Rambo, and it totally changed my mind about this book. For starters, Alice gave me a better understanding of what the book was about--I'd no idea, for example, that the Grimke sisters in this book were actual historical figures of great import in the abolitionist and proto-feminist movements. The thing is, these Grimke sisters did some pretty kick-ass things, so how is it that I'd never heard of them before reading Alice's review and then reading this book? In fact, I'm pretty sure my review here is mostly just gonna be a summary of the story and how much I liked it, so please read Alice's review to get a better sense of things. She's way funnier than I am and you'll enjoy it more. She's basically already said everything I want to say anyway, including excerpting one of the same passages that I'm going to use and commenting on how the Australian book cover is infinitely superior to the US one.

So, The Invention of Wings opens in Charleston in 1803 and is told in alternating points of view from Sarah Grimke, a daughter of one of the city's most prominent families, and Hetty/Handful, the little slave girl who is given to Sarah on her eleventh birthday. I don't know if it's white guilt, or our contemporary inability to truly grasp the horrors of slavery, or the general disinclination of writers to describe terrible things happening to children, but Sue Monk Kidd avoids the temptations to backpedal that other writers before have succumbed to.

In other words, she doesn't simplify the relationship between Sarah and Handful, even when they are children. In their own words:

Handful: "It was hard to know where things stood. People say love gets fouled by a difference big as ours. I didn't know for sure whether Miss Sarah's feelings came from love or guilt. I didn't know whether mine came from love or a need to be safe. She loved me and pitied me. And I loved her and used her. It was never a simple thing (54)."

 Sarah: "I saw then what I hadn't seen before, that I was very good at despising slavery in the abstract, in the removed and anonymous masses, but in the concrete, intimate flesh of the girl beside me, I'd lost the ability to be repulsed by it. I'd grown comfortable with the particulars of evil. There's a frightful muteness that dwells at the center of all unspeakable things, and I had found my way into it (115)."

Sarah's first act of defiance is to try to free Handful on the first night she's been given to her, but her family, who owned seventeen slaves in their Charleston house alone, not counting the ones working on their Low Country plantation, will not hear of it. Her second act of defiance is teaching Handful how to read, and these bold courses of action as a girl lay the groundwork for the woman she eventually becomes.

Handful, on the other hand, keeps a weather eye out for Sarah's mother, a rather harsh mistress, and learns at her mauma Charlotte's right hand how to sew and how to channel the feelings of rage and impotence that are a slave's birthright into something productive: making a story quilt and secreting money away to buy their freedom. Charlotte, clever and talented in equal measure, gets up to her own acts of defiance until one day she's caught, with truly terrible consequences.

Sarah's and Handful's chapters alternate seamlessly, and Kidd serves both voices well. Eventually both girls grow up and their lives take on radically different directions; Sarah's to the North, where she falls in with the Quakers, and Handful's to the new, radical African Methodist Episcopal church where both slaves and free blacks secretly work to create an uprising in Charleston.  Both moves turn out to be disastrous until each woman decides, with a certain grim determination, on the course of action she must take.

The book ends in 1838, twenty-five years before Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation into law, and by the time Kidd concludes her story, there have already been many inroads made against slavery in the United States, thanks in no small part to the tireless efforts of one Sarah Grimke, upon whom half of this novel is based. While I wouldn't say that The Invention of Wings is particularly literary, it does exactly what literature is supposed to do: inform, entertain, disturb, and engulf the reader in a story that is not the reader's own. I loved this book and found it nearly impossible to put down. I unreservedly recommend it to anybody who likes historical fiction, novels with strong female characters, and stories with a true emotional heft.

NB: Viking published this book in January 2014 and I read an advance reading copy that was sent to me at the publisher's initiative.

Book Review: Long Man by Amy Greene

The evening I picked up Long Man to read, I had never read Amy Greene before. I had just finished a different book and wasn't read to fall asleep just yet, and this book was sitting on my nightstand within reach, so I gave it try.  I picked it up at work to bring home because I was drawn to the colors and composition of the cover image; in a fit of mixing my metaphors and media, it reminded me of a cross between Willa Cather (author) and Russell Chatham (artist), neither of whom I actually know much about.

Turns out that Long Man is just up my alley, ticking off a lot of boxes of things that I love in my novels: Literary fiction? Check. Small town setting? Check. Celebrating the quiet dignity of a people often overlooked by the rest of the world? Check.  Southern? Cantankerous characters with old-fashioned names like Beulah? Exposes how the poor get waylaid by so-called progress for the convenience of the franchised? Check, check, and check.

There's no way to sum up this novel without making it sound dull, unfortunately, because the beauty of this novel lies in the richness of the characters and the location far more than in the actual plot.  It's the story of a handful of people in the small town of Yuneetah in east Tennessee in 1936.  Most of the town has already evacuated at the command of the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority), who intends to flood this valley in an effort to bring electricity to the region. A little girl goes missing on the same day that a drifter wanders through, a drifter with a checkered history in this town. Did the girl wander off on her own, or was she taken? With very few neighbors left to head up a search party, the girl's fate becomes more tenuous with each passing hour, especially with the rising floodwaters of the river (known locally as Long Man). Meanwhile, a very old woman who lives on the mountain above this valley reminisces about history--her own and the town's--and how nature will have the last laugh over both.

Amy Greene is masterful at demonstrating that while the 1930s South may have been a simpler time, it doesn't mean that its inhabitants are any less complicated than people today. She also lives up to the writerly admonition to show, not just tell. Here are some excerpts that give a good sense of the prose and tone of the novel:

"The people of Yuneetah were losing more than their property. They relied on each other. If a house was taken by a flood they rebuilt it. If a man got sick they worked his crops. If he died they rang the death bell and the whole town came to see what needed doing. It hurt them to part not knowing when or if they'd meet again."

"For the most part Ellard believed he had done right by his hometown. Outsiders might have judged him for looking the other way when the moonshine runners came through and passed whiskey out by the carloads, but the next day he would see the bootleggers paying their druggist bills and settling up with Joe Dixon. Ellard had always put te well-being of his neighbors above any stranger's idea of morality or justice."

If you like Southern novels, or the works of Kent Haruf, or the literary lovechild that Eudora Welty and Jim Harrison might have produced, you would definitely like this book.  If you savor a sense of place over a fast plot, finding pockets of local flavor amidst this largely homogenized nation of the US, this could be the book for you, too.

NB: I read an advance reading copy of this book that I believe I at one time requested from the publisher, but it's possible I just picked it up from my bookstore's galley room. It will be published in February 2014 by Knopf. 

Book Review: Someone Else's Love Story by Joshilyn Jackson

I had the opportunity a couple of weeks ago to attend a publisher dinner in Boston sponsored by William Morrow publishing.  These things are generally a lot of fun--or at least they are when I don't arrive late and a trio of drunk librarian bookblocks me (kinda like cockblocking, but with bookish things), but this one was especially fun for a variety of reasons: my husband was able to come with me as my date, I got to chat briefly with a Rhode Island bookseller I've been wanting to meet, I knew two of the authors personally (Beth Ann Fennelly and Tommy Franklin, the most gorgeous literary couple you could ever wish to meet), and I came away wanting to read an author whose books I've never paid attention to before.  In other words, that night for me was all winning, all the time.

So, Joshilyn Jackson...As I mentioned, I'd never read her before.  But then she walked into the room and started talking about her new book and kinda made me wonder why my head had been up my ass for so long.  This woman is funny.  Damn funny.  And smart.  And did I mention the funny?  She's also Southern, so when she sat down across from me, we got our drawl on, much to the amusement (and possible dismay) of the Yankee booksellers surrounding us.

Someone Else's Love Story is very much a relationship book.  Not necessarily a romance book, because just as much of the time it's about the relationship between a parent and a child or two best friends from childhood. Since most of the fiction I read could open with the line, "It was a dark and literary night," this book was something of a revelation. It's snappily written without necessarily being literary, and though there are some darker moments, it is, overall, a lighter read. I also think that children are particularly difficult to write well in books for adults, but Jackson succeeds on that front.

There are two narrators in this book: A first person narration from Shandi, who is young mother to little Natty, best friend to Walcott, and daughter of a whacked out and divorced set of parents.  Then there's a third person narration telling the story of William, a genetics scientist who is somewhere on the autistic/Asperger's spectrum and grieving from the loss of his wife and little girl from a car crash.   Thank goodness his own best friend, Paula, is there to help pick up the pieces.

One year to the date after said car crash, William and Shandi cross paths in a Circle K during an armed robbery, an event that binds them together for the rest of the novel. The moment William puts himself directly between Natty and the barrel of the gun, Shandi falls for him. Nobody is happy about this, least of all Shandi's friend Walcott or William's friend Paula.  In the mean time, Shandi and Natty have moved out of her mother's place in the country to move into her father's townhouse in, well, town in an effort to be closer to her school--she's gone back to school to finish her degree after taking time off for Natty's birth.

Amidst the trauma of being held at gunpoint and living in the city again, Shandi makes the decision to enlist William's help in discovering the boy who sexually assaulted her when she was in high school.  Here's where it gets a bit complicated.  You see, technically Shandi was a virgin when she gave birth to Natty.  Yes, she'd been assaulted, but her would-be rapist got his jollies on, er, prematurely and thus the virgin birth.

Anxieties, middle class mayhem, a Molotov cocktail, and unconventional love letters ensue. In the end, the author throws a couple of twists (one of which I actually did not see coming).  I loved this book up until the last 40 pages or so, and then I downshifted into merely liking it, but I have to say, this was one of those books that kept distracting me whenever I wasn't reading it. This book definitely wasn't my usual read, but I'm awfully glad that I broke through and discovered this author. Her writing is infused with warmth and humor, and who says a book where nothing truly terrible happens is a bad thing?  (Well, Cormac McCarthy probably says that...)

Here is an excerpt from her acknowledgements, which is a fairly representative sample of her writing. I kind of love this, not least because she thanks booksellers like me and uses the word "posse":

 I cannot function as a human, much less as a writer, without the following four posses: My reader posse: That's pretty much you, Person Who Bought This Book.  You are letting me keep this job I love.  Thank you. If you're one of those passionate and miraculous bookstore handsellers or big-mouthed, wonderful readers who recommend my books to other people, then I feel so warmly toward you, we should probably make out a little.

See what I mean?  Funny stuff.  She goes on to thank her writer posse, her family posse, and her Jesus posse, and immediately ends with "Shalom, y'all."  Joshilyn Jackson is a person I want to know.  And maybe make out with a little.

NB: This book will be published in December 2013 by William Morrow. I read an ARC that I received upon my request.