Easy as Pie – Pie Squared, a slab pie cookbook by Cathy Barrow

My grandfather used to say, "Patient waiting brings pie." No one in our family was much of a pie baker, but we enjoyed many pies from the legendary Horn & Hardart's and Hanscom's, both originally Philadelphia firms. Horn & Hardart's was widely known for their Automat restaurants in New York, which featured those great fruit pies, as well as individual chicken pot pies.

The overall premise of this cookbook is generally to demystify pie-baking, and to use a rectangular shallow form the author calls a "slab pie." The idea is a larger, easier to cut pie with more servings that takes the same or less effort than the traditional round pie or tart.

Piecrust, in particular, can be daunting for some home cooks, and except for graham and chocolate wafer crusts, and because I can be impatient in the kitchen, I usually buy mine, along with commercial phyllo dough and puff pastry. This cookbook makes crusts easier to manage, and includes some interesting options.

There is an overall Southern cooking style influence to a lot of the recipes, and a few recipes the inclusion of I'd question, but there are enough interesting options for fillings for savory main-course items. Just about every ethnicity's cooking style and spices have made it into this book. It's a good overview for those who are just getting into international cuisine.

Quite frankly, it's not a cookbook I'd add to my collection, but I'd recommend it for novice cooks and bakers.

Madcap Londoner Conquers New York – The Stylist Takes Manhattan by Rosie Nixon

A breezy, cheeky (it's British, after all) novel you can read in an evening or so.

Amber Green is a twenty-eight year old fashion stylist creating the window displays at London's Selfridge's Department Store. She's in a happy relationship with hunky Rob, a TV producer. Rob gets the opportunity to spend three months in New York filming a TV special that follows the backstory of what sounds quite a lot like the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show (coincidentally canceled this year), and asks Amber to accompany him. Of course, she accepts.

The two fly off to the Big Apple, find a shoebox-size apartment to sublet in Williamsburg (Brooklyn), and set up housekeeping...and that's when Amber's saga of misadventures truly begins.

Without revealing the details, Amber finds legal (she doesn't have a green card) work, meets crazy, kooky starlets, a disgraced fashion designer, and many others. She gets in a lot of trouble but finds her way out.

It's fun to read about her exploits, her subway and taxi expeditions, and travails with Rob and others. Does everything work out in the end? Of course it does, but that's beside the point - it's the getting there that's so entertaining.

The perfect distraction for a night of insomnia!

Shanghai Secrets – The Song of the Jade Lily by Kirsty Manning

Many of us living in the United States, whether we are of European (Ashkenazic) Jewish background, or not, are only dimly aware at best of the Jewish community that formed in Shanghai, China as World War II began. And, even if we know a bit about that, we probably know even less about Jewish emigration to Australia.

Here is a vivid and beautifully-crafted novel that brings that all into focus. A professional-class Jewish family flees their home in Vienna immediately after Kristallnicht and travels to Shanghai to find refuge. Their young daughter, Romy, horrified by the murders and losses she has witnessed, gradually becomes enthralled with her new milieu, but memories of her past are never far away.

Paralleling Romy's story is the contemporary one of her granddaughter, Alexandra. Alexandra has traveled to Melbourne from her job as a successful commodities trader and dealmaker in London to spend time with her elderly grandparents as her grandfather, Wilhelm, spends his last days. She is unusually close to her grandparents because they raised her after her parents were killed in an accident when she was a child, but Alexandra, who was told her mother was adopted from China, has many unanswered questions about her heritage. The research she has done so far has led to dead ends, and she hesitates to question her grandmother too closely while she is mourning.

When an opportunity to work in Shanghai opens up, it is a chance for Alexandra to move on from an unsuccessful romantic relationship in London, and to quietly go forward with the family research that is so important to her.

The stories of these two generations of women are enmeshed in a finely constructed, wonderfully descriptive narrative that carefully unmasks the secrets Romy and Wilhelm felt they needed to keep, and brings the closure Alexandra is seeking. And, for the reader, there is a great deal to learn and understand. Australian author Kirsty Manning has written a wonderful book, and I am hoping to find and read her debut novel, The Midsummer Garden, which has not been released here. There is another book coming in 2020, so far called The Lost Jewels – looking forward to that.

Reaching the Heights – Becoming, a Memoir by Michelle Obama

Michelle Obama is an extraordinary woman and her memoir is equally so. It's a fascinating and inspiring story, and obviously written in her true voice...you only have to be familiar with her speeches and many appearances on TV talk shows to know it. In fact, the writing rings so true that you can "hear" her. Were I still commuting, it would have been a wonderful audio book experience, but no matter, reading it was just fine as it came across as so immediate and animated. The 400-plus pages just flew by.

The book is divided into three main sections, plus an epilogue.

"Becoming Me" explores her childhood and teen years in the working-class South Side of Chicago, and her young adult years as she navigates her Ivy-League undergraduate experience at Princeton, law school at Harvard, and her partner-track work at a leading law firm – where she first met Barack Obama when he came on as a summer associate and she mentored him.

The second section is "Becoming Us", which describes their coming together as a couple, as ambitious young marrieds, and parents to Malia and Sasha. This is where we find out exactly what Barack Obama was doing as a Community Organizer, and how he moved on to the Illinois State Senate, to US Senator and then President of the United States. Through it all, their career and personal decisions for themselves and a couple were completely entwined, so theirs is truly a joint story.

Michelle Obama's professional accomplishments during this time are not as widely known or celebrated as her husband's, but they are equally impressive. She left the law firm, and became one of the forces behind a non-profit organization, Public Allies, which was created to help young people find their way into careers in public service and in non-profits. Following that, she became the Executive Director for Public Affairs at the University of Chicago Medical Center.

"Becoming More" covers the Obamas' White House years. It is fascinating to read how they rose to the demands of their positions, how they made adjustments to the way a First Family lives within the spotlight of the Presidency, and of the many experiences they all had in that setting. The pressure on them was even more intense than on other Presidents and their families, as the first African-Americans in that role. Being the first is always the most challenging and the most scrutinized, and we all know, and mainly due to the efforts of Michelle Obama, they more than rose to the occasion and became a shining example of what America is all about – a concept that is now being torn down and refuted by the Oval Office's current occupant.

Michelle Obama's time as First Lady is over, but at the age of fifty-five, we can expect to see much more from her. Just the other day, it was announced that a half-million dollars of earnings from the sale of her book would be donated to promote education and opportunities for girls. Every day I continue to be impressed by her. She is a force for what is good and positive, and how she reached the place she now occupies as a public figure should encourage millions of average Americans, especially young people, to do and be more. Reading her book can provide the inspiration for that.

Always Enduring – Blackbird House by Alice Hoffman

Over and over again, with book after book, I am awed by the prodigious artistry of Alice Hoffman and her ability to place the reader into any setting, time or place, and make them feel as though they are in the actual midst of the characters, perhaps as a concerned friend, but more likely as an unseen observer. Her writing is so evocative, so almost telepathically descriptive, that you feel you are there, whether it is in the garden of an old farmhouse near the waterfront somewhere on Cape Cod (as in this novel), in a remote village in war-torn France (The World That We Knew), or on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas (The Marriage of Opposites).

Blackbird House is a series of loosely connected stories that serve as chapters for what might be called the life of a home, first built during the British occupation of New England, by a fisherman for his wife. The house passes from family to family through purchases or bequests, but even as it and the times change, certain aspects of its occupants remain, whether it is in the turnips planted in the vegetable garden, or the mysterious white-feathered blackbird that continues to appear but can be seen only by some of those who reside there.

The house stands witness to two centuries-plus of love, tragedy, loyalty, betrayals and reconciliations. It represents the survival of the human spirit and its triumphs over all attempts by man or nature to tear it down or destroy it.

As Loretta Said, "Snap Out Of It" – The Book That Matters Most, by Ann Hood

The Book That Matters Most was definitely not as interesting or satisfying for me as Hood's The Obituary Writer. Perhaps it was because I couldn't develop enough sympathy for Ava, the character at the center of this novel – somehow she didn't ring true for me.

Ava is heartbroken and distraught when her husband of twenty-five years leaves her for another woman, which is certainly understandable. Her grown children, a son and a wayward troubled daughter, Maggie, are living far away from Ava's comfortable home in Providence. Ava's mother is long dead and that loss is a wound that has never healed because Ava has not accepted it. In many ways, Ava has not gone forward and this is her true problem.

The novel weaves around Ava's difficulty in coping with her losses. She has an affair with a younger man she meets in the book club she joins to combat her loneliness. (The structure of the book club is for each member to choose "the book that matters most" to them, hence this novel's title.) Her daughter, who is living in Paris, has fallen into a drug-centered existence and is completely dependent on the older man who has turned her head, made her a kind of love-slave and feeds her addiction.

The reality is that Ava does lead something of a charmed life. She lives in a beautiful home in an elegant section of Providence, Rhode Island. She teaches French. Unlike other women in mid-life who are faced with her losses, she is not struggling financially or materially. She has loyal friendships.

Her problems have a very first-world setting and I want her to get on with things and fix her life. It takes an entire novel and a lot of improbable twists before she gets around to that, and then the conclusion, which finally ties everything up, seems forced. A little ambiguity might have been better and given the reader more food for thought.