Since I’m often setting goals like “go to the gym seven hundred times a week,” the idea of reading a hundred books of FICTION in a year sounds like a dream.  I bet you read that much most of the [...]]]> Ambling around the internet this morning, I found this challenge from Book Chick City:

It seems a luxurious delight  worthy challenge for our insanely readerly selves. I signed up. Maybe you’ll want to join me. Click the icon.

Also, speaking of reading: The OtherLand Chronicles, the serial urban fantasy/YA/? I started for NaNoWriMo,  is still in progress.  Just started Chapter Nine this morning.  Posting M-W-F through December.  Having so much fun it’s just sinful.  ;)

To start at the beginning, go here: http://theotherlandchronicles.com/2011/10/starthere/

Barbara O’Neal, Bantam, $15 trade paper (416p) ISBN 978-0-553-38677-6

The Rita Award–winning author (as Barbara Samuel) of The Lost Recipe for Happiness returns with the absorbing story of Ramona Gallagher, a 40-year-old woman whose joy in running a bakery in Colorado Springs helps her [...]]]> from Publisher’s Weekly

How to Bake a Perfect Life

Barbara O’Neal, Bantam, $15 trade paper (416p) ISBN 978-0-553-38677-6

The Rita Award–winning author (as Barbara Samuel) of The Lost Recipe for Happiness returns with the absorbing story of Ramona Gallagher, a 40-year-old woman whose joy in running a bakery in Colorado Springs helps her transcend a life that’s anything but perfect.Ramona has a prickly relationship with her large, restaurant-owning family and a deep love for her daughter, Sofia, who Ramona had as a teenager and is now grown and pregnant. When Sofia’s husband is injured in Afghanistan and she flies to Germany to be with him, Ramona is left to care for Sofia’s 13-year-old stepdaughter, Katie, a scrawny child whose drug-addicted mother is in jail. Over the summer, Ramona struggles to keep her business afloat and find some solid footing with her family, bonds with Katie, aches for what her daughter is enduring, and rekindles a romance from 25 years earlier. O’Neal’s tale of strong-willed women and torn family loyalties is a cut above the standard women’s fiction fare, held together by lovingly sketched characters and real emotion. (Dec.)

Coming your way very soon, friends!  December 21.

It has been six years since Jennifer Crusie has written a solo novel.  Friends, it was worth the wait.  Maybe This Time, published by St. Martin’s Press on August 30th, is her best book yet.  It’s also another step in her long, interesting career, [...]]]> MAYBE THIS TIME
Jennifer Crusie
St Martin’s Press
ISBN 978-0-312-30378-5

It has been six years since Jennifer Crusie has written a solo novel.  Friends, it was worth the wait.  Maybe This Time, published by St. Martin’s Press on August 30^th, is her best book yet.  It’s also another step in her long, interesting career, from category romances to big, funny contemporary romances to suspens-y books written with Bob May, to….this.

Maybe This Time will draw a cheer from readers who adored Bet Me (2004 RITA award winner) and her earlier romances for St. Martins, but it is a step outside romance into women’s fiction, in a story about a woman who is discovers herself, saves some children, and along the way, realizes that maybe she has some lingering feelings for the husband she left behind.

Oh, and there are ghosts. Real ghosts.  I love ghosts, and almost no one takes them seriously enough for my tastes. Crusie got it.  But then, she gets writing. She gets the poignant aspects of humor for women.  She gets the tangled communication between men and women, and how that impacts our love stories.  She gets love stories, for that matter.  This book is smart and funny, as all Crusie work is, but it’s also wise and rich in the best, most vivid details, and best of all, powered by a fierce heart of understanding.

Andie Miller is ready to get married again, but before she can walk down the aisle with her fiancé Will, she has to actually divorce the husband she left ten years ago.  North Archer is a lawyer who has faithfully sent an alimony check to Andie every month for the entirety of that ten years.  When Andie shows up at his office to announce her intention to wed, North asks one last favor.  Andie, who is both unconventional and kind, is the only person he can trust to assess the situation with North’s two young wards, who are marooned in a supposedly haunted house they will not leave.  Andie, of course, refuses—she doesn’t need to be anywhere close to North now that she’s made up her mind to get this done—until he offers her ten thousand dollars for one month of work.  It would solve a lot of problems, that money.  Then he throws in the kicker: the kids are alone and they need somebody. Andie agrees, leaving her fiancé safely in his own apartment.

What she doesn’t expect are those ghosts, or to fall in love with a little girl, or to discover that she isn’t really over North at all.

Not many writers would have the huevos to tackle Henry James and the Turn of the Screw, but luckily for us, Crusie never backs away from the ideas and themes that enchant her.  Maybe This Time is a furious page turner, and just scary enough that I didn’t especially want to go downstairs to the basement alone to finish reading it.  The ghosts are as well drawn as the rest of the cast, and so is the creepy, atmospheric house with its turrets and sad history.

But what Crusie does better than anyone is find the heart of why we fall in love with a particular person, and how the yearning to be seen and then have a witness to share our lives with, are such powerful hungers in each and every one of us.  By turns kind and fierce and graceful, Maybe This Time is the one book this fall you will want the minute it hits the stands.

A BED OF SPICES is a wildly romantic tale of forbidden love set in the turbulent middle ages. Solomon and Rica meet by chance at the herbalist’s cottage and fall deeply in love despite the divisions of religion, class, and expectations — but how can they possibly find a happy ending with so [...]]]>

A BED OF SPICES is a wildly romantic tale of forbidden love set in the turbulent middle ages. Solomon and Rica meet by chance at the herbalist’s cottage and fall deeply in love despite the divisions of religion, class, and expectations — but how can they possibly find a happy ending with so many things stacked against them? Dark, beautiful and ultimately uplifting, this is a romance you won’t easily forget.

Only $3.99!

READ AN EXCERPT FOR FREE

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY

This was my first historical novel.  It came about when I discovered two things: that St Valentines day was celebrated in the middle ages, and also, that European Jews were persecuted during the plague.  Which might make you think this is much too grim for your reading pleasure, and I’ll admit it is a dark book, but it is also a romance.  It is focused on the love story between these two young, passionate, and conflicted human beings feel for each other, and what that might cost them.

Because of the unusual setting and storyline (which was quite quite different at the time), the book did not sell a huge number of copies, but as time goes by, it continues to attract devotion from some readers. This combination has led to a shortage of copies in circulation, and new editions are quite pricey.  One of my favorite comments over on GoodReads said that she tended to be cheap, but paid $15 for her copy and found it worth every penny.  Thank you, my dear.

One of my favorite reviews is here:  http://www.likesbooks.com/cgi-bin/bookReview.pl?BookReviewId=1389. , where it was awarded Desert Island Keeper status by Vivien Fritsche.

Here is the original cover, which I never liked and ended up on somebody else’s historical romance at some later date. How do you like the one my cousinSharon and I came up with (above)?  Does it appeal to you?

If you’d like to look for it in a print edition, you can try some of these sellers:

Amazon new and used copies of A Bed of Spices.  Recommend you skip the $2000 edition.

Barnes and Noble approved sellers of new and used copies of A Bed of Spices.

PANCAKE KISSES, BACON HUGS

Why breakfast is the secret of everything

I suppose I should confess upfront that I am a morning person. I wake up cheery, chatty and at the very first fingers of sunlight creeping over the [...]]]> THE SECRET OF EVERYTHING is out today! To celebrate, a love song to breakfast.

PANCAKE KISSES, BACON HUGS

Why breakfast is the secret of everything

I suppose I should confess upfront that I am a morning person. I wake up cheery, chatty and at the very first fingers of sunlight creeping over the horizon. I know you find this annoying. I know you wish I’d stop humming under my breath as I crack eggs and start the coffee, but I can’t help it. I was born a singing lark. This does, however, offer benefits to all you blinking owls and sleepy headed in-betweens.

Once upon a time, I had a job working the breakfast shift at an upscale diner. It meant getting up at 4:30 am to creep around the dark of my teeny-tiny house so I wouldn’t wake my roommate. I dressed in my uniform with its plunging neckline (an unfortunate feature of many waitress uniforms of the early 80’s), and braided my Rapunzel hair. In the cold dark, I drove to work in my clunker, feeling—yes, I admit it–smug that I was awake before the rest of the world. Here and there, a light clicked on in a kitchen, but mostly, the world slept on. Porch lights glittered against the velvet blackness of mountains on the horizon, the air was fresh. All was newly reinvented, and it was mine.

At work, I dove into the bustle of getting the place ready for the doors to open. It smelled faintly of cleaning supplies from the night crew, of baking biscuits and potatoes grilling. Every morning, I fell in love all over again with the empty stage of tidy, waiting tables, with the clatter of cooks prepping, and the heat of flatware straight out of the dishwasher. We waitresses made pot after pot after pot of coffee, filled cream pitchers; wiped down syrup dispensers and set out glasses of ice to fill quickly with water. We drank coffee by the gallon ourselves, and snitched bacon when we could get away with it. It made me feel important to create a world of efficiency and nourishment for the hungry humans about to stumble in and beg for coffee.

This passion for breakfast arrived in a roundabout way, I must admit. My mother, who is a very good cook under many circumstances, was born an owl, and she finds early morning painful, especially when her lark child rose well before sunrise and was known to dust siblings with flour or lipstick or explore—well, never mind. It was early, that’s all.

Because she loved us, my mother did manage to get up and fix us breakfast. She believed in a hot breakfast, but cooking anything much would have been dangerous considering her eyes were barely open. So she made hot cereal. Endlessly. Malto-Meal and Ralston, Cream of Wheat and a colorless, gluey oatmeal I loathed with the considerable passion of a toddler foodie. Thankfully, she left us to our own devices once we made it to late grade school and we never had to choke down porridge again.

Not the best circumstances to fall in love with breakfast, I know. The happy accident is that my mother briefly took a job at a manufacturing plant when I was about seven. The other three children went to my grandmother’s house for the day while I stayed home with my father and walked to school on my own.

Once in awhile, my father got dressed and took me to a little café downtown, where there were individual jukeboxes along the counter and at the tables, and we ate pancakes and eggs and tea. We sat at the counter on round stools. I flipped through the jukebox offerings as if I knew what they were while he flirted with the waitresses and they flirted back, and there was usually music playing, and cigarette smoke hanging in the air with heady notes of bacon and coffee and frying onions. I loved the food—little balls of cold butter on top of my French toast, glass pitchers of syrup, tiny tubs of jelly—but mostly I loved the time with my dad, having him all to myself. Afterward, my dad would drop me off at school and I’d head up the stone steps feeling warm and special, a girl who had extraordinary experiences.

I fell in love with breakfast then and there. All good breakfasts, but especially a good café breakfast. And from that love was born a book.

At the heart of my new book, The Secret of Everything, is a restaurant called 100 Breakfasts, where a lark of a woman cooks to heal the hearts and souls of the people in her town.

It is to 100 Breakfasts that the protagonist, Tessa Harlow, comes to explore the questions that have been haunting her. She is heart sore and weary, recovering from a freak accident and trying to find answers to questions that have only just now bobbed to the surface. When she sits down at the long counter at the 100 Breakfasts Café, she unwittingly sets in motion a tangled array of connections and reveals secrets that have been hidden for a long, long time.

It is also at 100 Breakfasts that Tessa gets to know widower Vince Grasso, who is trying to heal his own family, including the troubled Natalie, a 9 year old who takes food very seriously, and is working her way through the entire list of 100 breakfasts on the menu.

The Secret of Everything was born out of my passion for breakfast, for the power it has to heal and renew, to nourish and ground. It’s a book that was born out of those days when I was a child hating oatmeal and loving the French toast at the local café; when I fought with my sisters and the mornings when my father took me out to breakfast, just the two of us, because this is, at the heart of it, a story about fathers and daughters and how that connection can make or break a woman’s spirit. Tessa’s father is nothing like my own, of course, but a father who is devoted to his child gives her permission to be as mighty as she can be.

Ironically, Tessa’s favorite breakfast is oatmeal, because in my adulthood, I learned to love great oatmeal. It is my own breakfast of choice most days. Whole grain oats served with butter and my own spiced apples that are cooked to a deep, dark flavor. Because I am that lark, so smugly and cheerfully alert at the first glimmers of dawn, it falls to me to get up and make the tea and start the coffee so it fills the air with its fragrance. I set the water boiling and set the table with cloth napkins and the good sugar bowl and the milk pitcher. I set the stage for my sleepy headed partner, sometimes a child, to come blinking to the table and fill his belly and drink his coffee.

In this small act, I am offering the most solid secret I know: breakfast is the secret of everything.

Breakfast is love.

What is your favorite breakfast?

Let’s talk about books one more time before Christmas, shall we? What are you reading and recommending to others this year? What are some of your favorite reads [...]]]> First, before I forget, if you want a chance to win a collection of gourmet salts, go to barbaraoneal.com and post a favorite food from childhood.

Let’s talk about books one more time before Christmas, shall we? What are you reading and recommending to others this year? What are some of your favorite reads of the year?

This week, I’ve been finishing Eclipse, the third book in the Stephanie Meyers group. I have read the oddest things about this book, feminist rhetoric that makes it plain the readers just didn’t get it. I’m a fan. It’s over-the-top romance, no question, but Meyer gets forbidden love. She gets yearning. She gets the conflicts we all feel at that age. Edward is lovely, but I really, I’m madly in love with Jacob the werewolf. Duh. He’s hot (as in physically) and when he changes, he’s a big furry…dog. Who adores her. Edward is lovely and cool and glittery and also adores her. It doesn’t suck to be Bella.

An adult novel that is lyrical and unique is THE LAST WILL OF MOIRA LEAHY by Therese Walsh. Therese is a friend of mine, and I’ve known from the first time I read a page of her work (in one of my classes, not that I had a single thing to do with her success–the book was long written by the time I met her) that she was going to have a long and successful career as a writer. Last Will is the story of two sisters, separated by a tragic accident as teens. As the novel opens, it is years later and one of the sisters finds a mysterious sword that leads to Rome, to secrets long buried, to healing magic…and to love. It’s a hard book to classify–it is part puzzle, part relationship novel, part romance, part adventure; perhaps I could best describe it as a cross between a hip gothic and literary coming of age tale. Whatever you call it, it’s a fast-paced tale that readers here will enjoy.

Others I have mentioned here and wish to remind you: THE ART OF RACING IN THE RAIN, Garth Stein (my favorite book of the year); FIREFLY LANE, by Kristin Hannah (she has new books coming soon, too); ORANGE MINT AND HONEY, by Carleen Brice, which has been made into a television movie (she also has a new book out, which I have not yet read: CHILDREN OF THE WATERS). I’m sure there are others, including Midnight (below), but I’ll leave some room for other suggestions.

What else should be be on the lookout for this weekend as we rush into the last minute crowds?

One Christmas season, I was at loose ends.  I was finally, officially divorced after a fairly long marriage.  My sons were working and traveling, or out with their friends. There was a man I’d been seeing, but he was traveling, too, and anyway, he was never going to be My Guy and I [...]]]>

One Christmas season, I was at loose ends.  I was finally, officially divorced after a fairly long marriage.  My sons were working and traveling, or out with their friends. There was a man I’d been seeing, but he was traveling, too, and anyway, he was never going to be My Guy and I knew it. 

I was alone. A lot. And Christmas was bearing down on me with all the traditions I would not be indulging this year. No vats of cookies or Christmas morning bread. Not much shopping. So I wrote journals and surfed the Internet, and focused on mainly just getting through this boring, lonely Christmas. 

One night, I stumbled over the Julie/Julia Project.  It’s hard to remember now exactly where I entered the whole thing.  I opened it at random somewhere around the middle, led by some link from somewhere else. She had already finished it, but being a reader who wants the whole story, undisturbed, I waded my way back to the beginning and started to read from Day One.  I read until my eyes gave out that night, in my dead-quiet living room.  

And I came back the next night, and the next, and the next and the next, reading and reading and laughing at her misadventures, thinking, “If any editor on the planet has read this, surely she has a book deal by now.”  (And of course, by the end of the blog, she did land a book deal. A very good deal. Just as Julia did, with Mastering the Art of French Cooking.) 

I didn’t suddenly start cooking as I read. There was a pretty big wound in my kitchen, waiting to devour me. I hadn’t cooked much in a couple of years because cooking was family and my family was all in pieces. Also, my ex had fancied himself to be THE cook in  the family, so I was relegated to making great cookies and loaves of bread, and the workaday meals everyone could eat five days a week.  These days, there was almost never anyone home at dinner, so I ate Cheerios and Lean Cuisine and sometimes nothing else.

That hushed season, Julie Powell’s bad language and ineptness and moxie and honesty kicked my heart awake, and I told me mother I thought I might buy a copy of Mastering the Art of French cooking. To, you know, just mess around.  I don’t know that I really intended to do it.  But my mother (who has always seen me much too clearly for my comfort) beat me to it: she gave it to me for Christmas. 

It’s a luscious book. It’s impossible for a cook at any level to resist the kitchen once she starts to read, so I found myself cooking again. Not the breads and cookies and meals I made as mother/wife. Now I explored Julia Child–starting with vegetables, mostly, because no one in my family had ever really liked them, and I do; and eggs, and chicken breasts.  All through the dark days of winter, while things devolved more and showed me that I wasn’t dating the right person or living in the right place, or maybe even writing the right books, I cooked.  I cooked and wrote, wrote and cooked.

It turns out, I am not terribly interested in the French method. There are things I enjoy about it–who doesn’t like mushrooms sauteed in butter, or chicken breasts cooked in wine?–but I began to see that I was already an excellent cook with a clearly defined method of my own.  My ingredients are chiles and fresh tomatoes and avocados and spinach.  My style is more California than Paris; I’m not a huge meat eater (though I’ve failed at repeated attempts to become vegetarian, too); prefer olive oil to butter and fresh lemons to Hollandaise. 

During those long dark days of winter, cooking, I finally heard my own preferences and desires and voice. Cook spinach, it said. Write about tamales. Move to Colorado Springs.

Yesterday, I went to see Julie/Julia and absolutely adored it.  It’s a very rich story with brilliant acting and wonderful visuals and a great storyline about how wonderful cooking is, but it’s also the story of two women falling in love with their work, finding themselves in words and cooking, cooking and words. 

I had not expected that I would remember that lonely winter, but as I cheered Julia in her pursuit of her cooking and cookbook, and cheered Julie in her pursuit of the year of cooking, I found I was also cheering myself, that woman pursuing herself with bravado and then calm.  Because I, too, cooked with Julia and Julie, and cooked up myself and wrote a book which became THE LOST RECIPE FOR HAPPINESS.  That circle, Julia to Julie to me, me to you, each of them to millions of others–seemed so lovely that I came home and cooked.  I made sauteed mushrooms in honor of Julia, and I cooked the chicken breasts in wine, but I also added grilled lemons to the mix, because I love them, and served them with steamed yellow squash which is fresh and particularly perfect right now.  

I think Julie and Julia would approve.

————————

If you’re interested, the Julie/Julia Project is still online.  Here is a link to the first page, which has a lot of comments, but if you go to the next few days, you can see that nobody read her blog for ages.  It’s fun to watch the evolution, see the backstory: http://blogs.salon.com/0001399/2002/08/25.html

http://anitalaydonmiller.blogspot.com/

I should add that she most graciously interviewed me and read my book open-mindedly even though I accidentally blindsided her in a blog I wrote for RTB.  Thanks, Anita.  A lady and a scholar.