Her Fearful Book Review

I really loved The Time Traveller's Wife, just like pretty much every other person who a) can read and b) has ovaries. So I did that split Oh Boy Another Book By That Author With The Name I Can't Pronounce/Uh-Oh, Second Books Often Suck sort of reaction when I heard about Her Fearful Symmetry.

I had a whole bunch of mixed reactions to the book, which means that it's taken me 2 weeks after I read it to write about it. So here, in no particular order, is what I thought about it:

1) It was enjoyable in a Gothic We Live Near A Famous Cemetery And Our Apartment Has A Ghost In It And We Are Twins And One Of Us Is Unhealthy In That Victorian Sort Of Way thing. I appreciate writers who are willing to take wild chances in their books, and this book was inventive and highly Victorian and fun in a Halloween-y sort of way. If I was still 15, this might have been my favorite book ever.

2) Really, Audrey Niffenegger? Really? Are you really going to have grossly inappropriate age-match-ups in all of your books? I don't want to read about a childlike 20 year old (who, the book makes clear, looked and acted like 12 year olds. Ick.) making out with some 50-something fella, thank you. That's repellent, not erotic.

3) Those cutesy hand-holding, white-wearing little mousy twins? I wanted to slap both of them. Ugh. It's not that I object to having immature characters as the primary characters in a book - but it's tricky to write them so that they're not twee or irritating or just frankly unbelievable. I liked the brief glimpses of a middle-aged Dutch female character so much that I really hope that in her next book she gives up writing about adolescents and starts writing about actual adult women. It is an important thing to realize that being a weirdo doesn't make you interesting AND it's extra important for authors to realize that their books don't have to abundantly full of yucky nutbars, either.

4) I find the combination of macabre and cutesy unsettling - and I can't decide if that's a good or a bad thing. I like my macabre to be full-out macabre, and cutesy has to be done carefully for me not to start rolling my eyes and swearing in a distinctly uncute manner. I don't know if I think this book was successful as a book, if you know what I mean. I don't know if it works.

5) It was disappointing BUT it was still interesting, and she's a beautiful writer. I LIKE that she handles macabre themes, I LIKE that she was willing to take such a tremendous risk as an author for her second book, and I liked the book well enough. Oh, and I really loved the cover art.

6) Is it worth reading? Yes, unless you really want to read The Time Traveller's Wife Part 2. It's a completely different book and much closer to her roots as a graphic novellist, but it's an interesting, entertaining read - and it would be a fun choice right now with Halloween right around the corner.

Julia's Kitchen Wisdom

Random House sent me a copy of Julia's Kitchen Wisdom: Essential Techniques and Recipes From A Lifetime of Cooking, a Julia Child cookbook released to go along with the Julie and Julia movie. Although it's a slim book, it's fantastically helpful, full of pretty much everything you'd need to know if you actually want to learn how to cook.

It's not a book for stark kitchen beginners but if you're already comfortable in the kitchen, this is the sort of thing that can help you move on to the next level - techniques and recipes that are both challenging and laid out in her intelligent, easy-to-follow style. And there are lots of fun pictures of Julia Child, too - all in all, a nice introductory book to Julia Child's recipes.

SafetyTat Review

I was asked if I would review SafetyTats, and it was a very timely question since we were planning on doing a bunch of travelling at that point of the summer: county fairs and big malls and science centers and parks and I don't know about YOU, but I've already misplaced one kid at a crowded venue and those minutes until we located our wandering kid are probably going to deduct whole decades from my life. So a product specifically intended for THAT situation really appealed to me.

We were sent a package of boy and girl tattoos, as shown, some alcohol wipes and a permanent marker. My kids were immediately gung-ho to try them out - who KNOWS how far they might wander in our yard? But we saved them for a Big Outing and frankly, they were a TREMENDOUS peace of mine for me. They stayed on for several days, too.

The only downsides:

1) They HURT to take off! They're much like bandages but with much better adhesive. One of my kids was very stoic and just yoiked them off when the time came but the other one wailed a whole lot. Still, the kid in question is prone to that, and insisted upon putting on another SafetyTat THE VERY NEXT DAY so it can't have hurt THAT much.

2) My youngest kid had an allergic reaction - which I was not expecting - to the adhesive. She's had bandages before and not reacted, so this was a bit of surprise. She's fine and it wasn't serious, and according to the company, she's one of only 3 kids to react to the medical-grade non-latex adhesive. She's just a special kid, that one. My other 2 kids had no reactions and LOVED wearing their SafetyTats, and the company recommends that adhesive-sensitive kids use the Original SafetyTats (which have your cell numbers already printed on) instead of the Quick Sticks.

Would I recommend them? Yep. My kids liked wearing them, and they seem like a much better, tidier option than writing a cell number on their arms with a permanent marker, which is what we've done in the past. I also liked the number of SafetyTats for young children with serious allergies and health issues - something I can imagine bringing parents a lot of peace of mind on field trips and school outings. They also made my older kids feel much more confident and less nervous in busy settings this summer, because they knew that they would be able to reach us if we became separated - which was a big deal for them.

If you are interested, SafetyTat has offered my readers a 15% off coupon on orders of $15 or more. The coupon code is FrogandToad.

Poly To Go

I was sent several packages of Polysporin's new product, Poly To Go, to review. It's a little egg-shaped portable spray bottle of Polysporin that's a good size to tote with you during summer outings, and my kids were very eager to injure themselves so I could use it on them, the weirdos.

I was, to be honest, a bit baffled by this product - and then one of my kids cut their leg on a piece of DIRTY, FILTHY PLAYGROUND EQUIPMENT and I remembered that I'd stashed one of the little Poly eggs in the car. It was a big relief, my kid found it very comforting and suddenly the product completely made sense. It's a nice size to toss in a pocket or a purse for summer outings, since kids DO hurt themselves a lot during all of the summer fun. If you're in Canada, here's" a $3 off coupon, too.

Babycakes, Maybecakes

I have rarely been as disappointed in a cookbook as I was by Babycakes (which has the subtitle "Vegan, Gluten-Free, and (Mostly) Sugar-Free Recipes from New York's Most Talked-About Bakery)".

Let's start with what I did like about the book, though.

1) It is BEAUTIFULLY photographed. Before I'd looked through it first - and I really should have, but more on that later - I handed Babycakes to The Baby and told her cheerfully that I could make her anything out of it, and she very cheerfully looked through it. Most books aimed at people with severe allergies or food intolerance's are not so beautifully photographed, and it was a pleasure to see it.

2) Erin McKenna has a nice, friendly writing style, and does a good job of explaining baking basics to novices. This sounds like a small thing but it is NOT - I have many baking books that are as dry as dust, books where the author does not explain even complicated instructions.


3) The gingerbread that I made - with some adaptations, which I'll explain later - and that I am currently eating is VERY good. I am sure many of the other recipes would be equally good, too.

Let's look at the book's claims now, shall we?

Vegan
It IS a vegan cookbook, and if that mattered to me, I would be very cheerful. Of course, the book makes a lot of claims that the things in it are healthy - which would be irresistible for many people I know: healthy frosted cupcakes? SIGN ME UP.

Just taking the eggs and dairy out of a cupcake does not make it healthy (unless you are allergic to eggs and dairy and then BY ALL MEANS) and using - excuse me while I vomit into my garbage can just thinking about it - "garbanzo-fava bean flour" in your cupcake does not make it virtuous. Taking the eggs and dairy and wheat out of a cupcake is a good thing if you are allergic to eggs and dairy and wheat, but it is does not magically transform a cupcake into a slice of healthy bread or something. The cupcake recipe, for example, has 1 CUP of coconut oil in it, and 1 1/2 cups of "agave nectar" or, as my husband calls it, "really expensive corn syrup."

The book claims that coconut oil "stores in your body as energy and not fat, and supports the proper function of the thyroid.... it's a bit pricey, but so are the heart attacks it helps prevent." The health claims being made for coconut oil are not universally held to be true - Dr. Weill, for example, wrote bluntly on his website that he does not recommend using coconut oil.

The author DOES suggest other substitutions for coconut oil, so I wouldn't let that deter me if I was interested in the book. The only recipes where coconut oil seems to be essential are the lush-looking frosting recipes, which depend upon coconut oil's thickening qualities. Or you could use coconut oil. Your call.

Gluten-Free
Sigh.

A fourth of the recipes in this slim book - there are only 48 recipes, I believe (not counting a handful of beverage recipes) - are NOT gluten-free. They use spelt, which while WHEAT-free, contains gluten.

There IS an explanation on how spelt is wheat-free, not gluten-free, but THE COVER STILL SAYS "GLUTEN-FREE" right on it. If I wrote a book called "Beck's Completely Vegetarian Book" and 1/4 of the recipes had BACON, wouldn't you be ticked off?

So, many of the recipes that my little tiny child with celiac disease happily wrote her name beside are completely off-limits to her. If you have a child on a restricted diet, you likely know how that made me feel.

(Mostly) Sugar-Free
What?

Every recipe - all of them, with no substitutions offered - uses "agave nectar", which is widely touted in health food-y circles as being a miracle food. The claims being made for it are EXTREMELY controversial, and it is STILL sugar. It is AS high in calories, is no more "natural" then corn syrup (and many people believe as bad for you as corn syrup, too), not any safer for diabetics and did I mention EXTREMELY expensive? My little wee bottle cost me $12 and was enough for ONE batch of cupcakes.

Other liquid sweeteners - honey, molasses, maple syrup or corn syrup - might be able to sub in for agave nectar in some of the recipes, although agave nectar is so sweet that without it, many of the recipes would NOT turn out. I was quite happy with the pumpkin gingerbread that I made last night, using honey instead of agave nectar, but it would not work as a substitution in cupcakes, for example.

So the book is not "Sugar-Free." It is not even "(Mostly) Sugar-Free."

Most Talked-About

By famous people.

Yes, nothing impresses me more than having Natalie Portman tell me that these recipes "all tasted better than anything made with butter, cream, and eggs", than Mary-Louise Parker telling me how good for me these recipes are, that Zooey Deschanel is so happy to finally have safe snacks, that Pamela Anderson loves them because they are "less chubby desserts" and ON and ON. Yes, we GET it. You have famous friends.

Celebrity butt-kissing is one of my big pet peeves, in case you've just started reading me today or something. Natalie Portman is not magically an expert on baked goods just because she's talented and pretty. Pamela Anderson is not the person to ask about the calorie content of baked goods (and the calorie content would still be quite high from my guess, although the book provides no nutritional information). Mary-Louise Parker does not have an additional degree in nutrition as well as being on television.

So how were the recipes?
I've tried a handful of recipes from the book - the vanilla cupcakes, which I made as directed, the cornbread, which I adapted to be gluten-free and using honey as a sweetener, and the pumpkin gingerbread, which I also made with honey.

The vanilla cupcakes were a dud. The taste of the gluten-free flours was overwhelming, and everyone in the house had a stomach ache after eating ONE unfrosted cupcake.

The cornbread was more of a success - lighter than most gf cornbreads I've made.

And the pumpkin gingerbread was DELICIOUS. I frosted it - not being a vegan - with a cream cheese frosting, which was perfect, but if you are a vegan, a plain vanilla - or lemon!- frosting would set it off nicely, too.

So on its own terms, it is not a bad cookbook. The recipes perform reasonably well - although I am not going to make the cupcakes again - and if you or your child have dairy, egg or wheat issues, this might work well for your family. I find the kind of miracle food claims that books like this make worrisome, however, and I dislike having bony celebrities in my cookbooks telling me that a batch of not-anything-special cupcakes that cost $25 to make - in the middle of a severe recession! - are in some way morally or nutritionally superior to another batch of cupcakes.

I did like the author's calm writing, and the recipes looked beautiful. I'd be interested to see future gluten-free books from her, books that don't rely on such controversial, expensive ingredients.

Marrying The Mistress

Joanna Trollope is, I find, a bit of an under-read modern author. It's not at all that she's not a good writer - she's very good and has a deft, subtle voice - but that her topics tend to be small and thus rather unfairly relegated to the ladies' fiction pile.

I just reread a recent rerelease (can I fit any more REs into this sentence? Maybe.) of her book Marrying The Mistress, which is both a very good book - golly, she can write - and a very bad book in that it suffers from Baby Boomer* disease and a rather subtle moral rot.

(*she's a few years too old to actually be a Baby Boomer, but close enough.)

The book, to sum up, concerns Judge Guy Stockdale, who leaves his wife of a very, very long time for a much younger woman. His wife has been a homemaker for her whole life, but over the book we learn that it's all right that she loses both her long-time husband and her beloved house because not only does she not have a career, but she is that most Baby Boomerish of sinners, an emotionally reserved mother. His mistress - the fatherless and MUCH younger Merrion Palmer - is obviously more deserving of his love. For one, she dresses much better. For another, the lighting in her apartment is more carefully chosen, designed to enhance one's very special moods. Don't our moods deserve enhancing? Obviously, she is a special woman, unlike First Wife.

Merrion's mother - another emotionally reserved mother and hence another villain - has only Merrion in her life and is horrified to find out that her only child is boffing a married man, instead of supporting and encouraging her, as any good mother would. Why, she even has the temerity to directly confront Guy and to say outright to him that he is jeopardizing her child's happiness and that his being so much older means either that her child will be deprived of being a mother herself (also, she commits the sin of suggesting that having children is in some way linked to the fulfillment of most women. Tsk.) or that she will be a widow with young children. For this unwarranted intrusion, Merrion does not speak to her mother again for the remainder of the novel.

Guy has two children, both grown men. One is married and has three teenaged children and is his mother's favorite and the other is a saintly gay man and the confidant of his brother's wife. I can't remember anyone's names at this point and I'm too lazy to look them up. Anyhoo. So the married guy and his wife have a chaotic messy house and busy careers and no one ever seems to be able to prepare a meal and their 3 young teenagers roam around the house unsupervised, and in one case, having a short-lived and upsetting sexual relationship. But never fear! The teenager learns that what's really important is that he Expressed His Feelings to the girl in question, and who taught him this? Why, his errant grandfather, who emerges from these pages as a New Man, able to freely express his feelings. Simon - ah, that's his name! - and his wife have a Good Marriage - they talk about their feelings and cry a lot and they both have careers instead of being some pampered, childish first wife - the Old Wife - who is thrust unceremoniously from her home and her garden, mocked by her children, and forced to turn to pottery. The end.

Martha Stewart's Cupcakes

This is a very, very tempting book.

I've already baked a lot of the recipes - they're from the stable of Martha Stewart magazines - and I've had mixed results with them, as is fairly typical with Martha's recipes. ("Martha"? Are we on a first name basis now?) The pictures make every recipe look just sweepingly gorgeous, but I happen to know, for example, that the Strawberry Cupcakes - so irresistibly pink - turn into leaden fleshy lumps. The Red Velvet Cupcakes are delicious, however, and the Devil's Food Cupcakes - the cover model! - are lovely. And my son went through and carefully wrote his name beside every recipe he wanted me to try, which would be all of them. Every. Single. One.

There's some helpful information on basic decorating techniques, which still probably wouldn't help me much, and a dandy chapter on holiday cupcakes. There are lots and lots of pictures that are the baking equivalent of pin-up girls, all lush icing and full cakey curves. And to carry the pin-up girl metaphor stupidly far, many of the recipes are unreliable and will fall flat - but it's still a completely gorgeous book, and probably a necessary addition for the baking fan.