The eighty-third book I read in 2014 was The Glass Kitchen by Linda Francis Lee. I finished this book on 9/16/14. I rated this book 4.5 stars out of a scale of 5. This book is about Portia Cuthcart, who discovers she has “the knowing” when she is still only a small child. “The knowing” is a form of future-telling through food that has run in her family for generations. Portia hopes to learn what this gift means through the help of her grandmother, but as the years pass her grandmother doesn’t end up directly teaching her anything about their shared gift. Portia seems to figure most things out on her own though, and muddles through until her fiance tells her that he needs her to give up “the knowing” and be normal. Soon after, her grandmother dies in a very odd way and Portia blames herself, so she shuts herself off from “the knowing” for three long years.
When her husband divorces her because he got her supposedly best friend pregnant though, Portia flees to New York City and it is there that she discovers herself again. She becomes infatuated with her upstairs neighbor, Gabriel, and though she keeps telling herself not to, she can’t help but become involved in his life and his two girls’. Things start sliding downhill though when Portia and her sisters try to open a trial restaurant in Portia’s apartment. And all the while Ariel (one of the daughters) is trying to do a school report on her family and is uncovering some troubling secrets. She’s also trying to cope with the trauma of watching her mother die in a car crash, while also dealing with her fear of becoming invisible herself.
Overall, this was just such a great book. It was touching, emotional, funny, heart-wrenching, and riveting all at once. Though I thought that the bad guys could’ve gotten a harsher punishment, the happy ending was for the most part exactly what I wanted it to be. And I loved the depth of the characters in the story, they came alive to me. This was the first book I’ve read by this author, I’ll definitely have to check out some of her other books!
Link to author website: http://www.lindaleebooks.com/
Link to Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/The-Glass-Kitchen-Novel-Sisters/dp/0312382278/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1410907140&sr=8-1&keywords=the+glass+kitchen
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