Relish: My Life in the Kitchen Author: Lucy Knisley | Language: English | ISBN:
B00C3KY7TU | Format: EPUB
Relish: My Life in the Kitchen Description
Lucy Knisley loves food. The daughter of a chef and a gourmet, this talented young cartoonist comes by her obsession honestly. In her forthright, thoughtful, and funny memoir, Lucy traces key episodes in her life thus far, framed by what she was eating at the time and lessons learned about food, cooking, and life. Each chapter is bookended with an illustrated recipe—many of them treasured family dishes, and a few of them Lucy's original inventions.
A welcome read for anyone who ever felt more passion for a sandwich than is strictly speaking proper, Relish is a graphic novel for our time: it invites the reader to celebrate food as a connection to our bodies and a connection to the earth, rather than an enemy, a compulsion, or a consumer product.
A Publishers Weekly Best Children's Book of 2013
An NPR Best Book of 2013
- File Size: 124233 KB
- Print Length: 176 pages
- Publisher: First Second (April 2, 2013)
- Sold by: Macmillan
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00C3KY7TU
- Text-to-Speech: Not enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #66,276 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #1
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Comics & Graphic Novels > Graphic Novels > Contemporary Women - #6
in Books > Comics & Graphic Novels > Graphic Novels > Contemporary Women - #10
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Comics & Graphic Novels > Graphic Novels > Nonfiction
- #1
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Comics & Graphic Novels > Graphic Novels > Contemporary Women - #6
in Books > Comics & Graphic Novels > Graphic Novels > Contemporary Women - #10
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Comics & Graphic Novels > Graphic Novels > Nonfiction
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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