The Kitchen Daughter

By: Jael McHenry

Genre: General Fiction

Rating: 4 stars

Summery:

After the unexpected death of her parents, painfully shy and sheltered 26-year-old Ginny Selvaggio seeks comfort in cooking from family recipes. But the rich, peppery scent of her Nonna’s soup draws an unexpected visitor into the kitchen: the ghost of Nonna herself, dead for twenty years, who appears with a cryptic warning (“do no let her…”) before vanishing like steam from a cooling dish.

A haunted kitchen isn’t Ginny’s only challenge. Her domineering sister, Amanda, (aka “Demanda”) insists on selling their parents’ house, the only home Ginny has ever known. As she packs up her parents’ belongings, Ginny finds evidence of family secrets she isn’t sure how to unravel. She knows how to turn milk into cheese and cream into butter, but she doesn’t know why her mother hid a letter in the bedroom chimney, or the identity of the woman in her father’s photographs. The more she learns, the more she realizes the keys to these riddles lie with the dead, and there’s only one way to get answers: cook from dead people’s recipes, raise their ghosts, and ask them

My Thoughts:

I loved, loved, loved the point of view character here. She doesn't have a disorder, she has a personality. It was great to read a book from a person with mild Aspergers  Syndrome. And I also liked how the beginning of the chapters had recipes from the story. (Some of them worked I tried and they made me happy.) Now, the book does have a lot of food references but the story really does focus on how Ginny grows and learns to cope after the death of her parents. One thing I really love is the relationship between her and her housekeeper. She is like a second mother who teaches Ginny how to grow beyond her difficulties. 

I think that this book, while it isn't a total foodie book, is a great one to read. It deals with grief and all of its different forms and beautifully describes life after death.