Relish: My Life in the Kitchen Author: Visit Amazon's Lucy Knisley Page | Language: English | ISBN:
1596436239 | Format: EPUB
Relish: My Life in the Kitchen Description
From School Library Journal
Gr 6 Up-In 12 autobiographical vignettes, a comic artist recalls growing up surrounded by a love of food. Knisley shares coming-of-age experiences in tandem with recipes for some memorable dishes. All are illustrated with full-color cartoons that guide readers step-by-step to the creation of these culinary delights. α(c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
From Booklist
Knisley, daughter of a chef mother and gourmand father, had the kind of upbringing that would make any foodie salivate, and she’s happy to share. In this collection of memories studded with recipes, she explores how food shaped her family life, friendships, travel experiences, and early career as a cartoonist. Loosely connected chapters chart a child- and young adulthood surrounded by cooks and bakers, bouncing between Manhattan kitchens and upstate farmhouses, and through art school and the booming culinary scene in Chicago. Knisley’s artwork has a classic, Richard Scarry vibe, and her illustrated recipes—from a family-special leg of lamb and huevos rancheros to the trick for perfectly sautéed mushrooms—are particularly delightful and inventive. Knisley tempers any navel-gazing impulses with humor, humility, and honesty, noting, for example, that even someone who loves fine food can still put away a truckload of McDonald’s fries from time to time. Just about everything in this rambling memoir is handled with good cheer, which hints at the positive energy and personal fulfillment Knisley has wrought from her young life in food. --Ian Chipman
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- Lexile Measure: 970L (What's this?)
- Series: Relish
- Paperback: 176 pages
- Publisher: First Second (April 2, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1596436239
- ISBN-13: 978-1596436237
- Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.6 x 0.5 inches
- Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Relish: My Life in the Kitchen is a memoir in comic form about the author's life experiences with food. I read it over the course of a couple of nights and really enjoyed it - though I highly suggest you read it when you have delicious food in the house and not when you are in the midst of a grocery shopping drought like me. It's a little depressing to read a book about the joys of cooking and eating well when you yourself are eating Morningstar buffalo wings and whatever you can salvage from a bag of green beans. But other people plan their grocery shopping better than I do! And Knisley does spend some of her book defending the joys of fast food restaurants and Ramen soup, so I didn't feel so bad.
And honestly, Knisley is such a bright and cheerful person who draws such bright and cheerful (and colorful!) pictures and shares such bright and cheerful food stories that it's impossible to feel bad when reading this book. I'm a big food lover myself, so I can identify with Knisley's inability to separate places she's visited from the food she's eaten while there. And the way she talks about potluck dinners and having friends over to share a meal - I absolutely agree with her, it's one of my favorite things in the world to have or attend a dinner party with close friends.
This book doesn't have a plot. It is episodic in nature, starting with Knisley's childhood first in Manhattan, and then in upstate New York, through trips to Japan and Mexico and then her college stint in Chicago. She ends each chapter with a recipe (shared in a lovely cartoon format that I thoroughly appreciated), and throughout the book she has a lot of other really interesting tips and tricks.
I slightly waffled between giving this four stars and giving it five stars. The book has some minor flaws, but none that really ruined it for me as a whole. Relish pretty much falls into the type of graphic novel I've come to expect from this publisher: a nice alternative/indie type niche read that is of good quality.
While this is undeniably an autobiography of her life, it's also a story of food. Good food, bad food, and all that falls between those two groups. Knisley utilizes an episodic format with recipes or culinary advice sandwiched inbetween the tales. Most of the story is told in a linear format, but there are one or two mentions of her childhood later in the book. This works well, as it keeps the reader from getting too bored with the minute details. After all, meals are a relatively short portion of our lives and daily routine when you get down to it (even those meals that last for a few hours), so it makes sense that the stories should only be a few pages at a time. This might frustrate some readers that want to know more about a specific time period, though. I have to say that occasionally I wanted to read more about one or two things, such as Knisley's time at college.
The artwork was something I really enjoyed and it helped out in some instances where the words couldn't entirely portray the scene alone. Now you might be thinking "but it's a graphic novel- it's naturally reliant upon pictures, right?" I'd agree, but there are some instances in graphic novels where the scene is given a complete narration/description, but is so well depicted in the artwork that the written descriptions are superfluous and/or just a bonus extra.
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