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Growing up in the 1960s and ’70s, Kate Moses was surrounded by sugar: Twinkies in the basement freezer, honey on the fried chicken, Baby Ruth bars in her father’s sock drawer. But sweetness of the more intangible variety was harder to come by. Her parents were disastrously mismatched, far too preoccupied with their mutual misery to notice its effects on their kids.
A frustrated artist, Kate’s beautiful, capricious mother lived in a constant state of creative and marital emergency, enlisting Kate as her confidante—“We’re the girls, we have to stick together”—and instructing her three children to refer to her in public as their babysitter. Kate’s father was aloof, ambitious, and prone to blasts of withering abuse increasingly directed at the daughter who found herself standing between her embattled parents. Kate looked for comfort in the imaginary worlds of books and found refuge in the kitchen, where she taught herself to bake and entered the one realm where she was able to wield control.
Telling her own story with the same lyricism, compassion, and eye for lush detail she brings to her fiction, coupled with the candor and humor she is known for in her personal essays, Kate Moses leavens each tale of her coming-of-age in Cakewalk with a recipe from her lifetime of confectionary obsession. There is the mysteriously erotic German Chocolate Cake implicated in a birds-and-bees speech when Kate was seven, the gingerbread people her mother baked for Christmas the year Kate officially realized she was fat, the chocolate chip cookies Kate used to curry favor during a hilariously gruesome adolescence, and the brownies she baked for her idol, the legendary M.F.K. Fisher, who pronounced them “delicious.”
Filled with the abundance and joy that were so lacking in Kate’s youth, Cakewalk is a wise, loving tribute to life in all its sweetness as well as its bitterness and, ultimately, a recipe for forgiveness.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
May 11, 2010 -
Formats
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780440338383
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780440338383
- File size: 4157 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Kirkus
March 1, 2010
Salon.com senior editor Moses (Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath, 2003, etc.) shares an emotive life framed by sugary sweets.
The author grew up in Palo Alto, Calif., in the 1960s, and her mercurial, struggling-artist mother co-dependently bonded amid a male-dominated household. A"compliant, tidy daughter," Moses recalls sugar being the"mainstay of my diet as a child," which only amplified her"cake obsession" as an adult. The author recalls fond memories of her San Franciscan relatives, especially her"parsimonious old coot" of a grandfather who demonstrated an uncanny knack for fudge-making and trolling the dump for discarded treasures. Her confident mother subsisted within a"fairly constant thrum of creative emergency," demonstrated in the crafting of spectacular birthday cakes for her children like three-dimensional bunnies and an elaborate gingerbread Noah's Ark. Though Moses believed her parents to be"disastrously mismatched," they managed to keep the family unified throughout frequent relocations to various East Coast locales to accommodate her father's job, as well as a move from Virginia to Alaska in 1974 that created significant riffs in her parent's marriage. In the years that followed, the author found contentment in random boyfriends, her college days back in California, a prized editorial job at North Point Press in Berkeley, where she befriended authors like M.F.K. Fisher and Kay Boyle, and in creating a family of her own. Deliberate, sensitive and meticulous, the narrative brims with dense, curiously exacting detail, and each chapter closes with a tempting, uncomplicated recipe.
A delectable, well-crafted memoir.(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)
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Booklist
April 15, 2010
Novelist Moses recounts her lifes journey, planting its mileposts by the foods that have figured in her personal history. As emphasis, she provides a relevant recipe with each chapter. The foods that have meant most to her fall into the category of American comfort foods, her tastes leaning toward the decidedly simple. Traversing the country from California to Pennsylvania as a schoolgirl, she relished what was for her the novelty of McDonalds but she at the same time was developing a taste for more exotic fare such as fried clams. Her family moved often, and her parents eventually divorced. Moses reflects on how all of this uncertainty affected her eating preferences. Landing an editorial position at Berkeleys North Point Press, she encountered writers on the order of Kay Boyle and the estimable M. F. K. Fisher, and they helped to broaden and to ground her tastes, both literary and gustatory.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)
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Formats
- OverDrive Read
- EPUB ebook
Languages
- English
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