AUTHOR: Linda Francis Lee
PUBLISH DATE: June 17, 2014
PUBLISHER: St. Martins Press
384 pages
Amazon: $10.99 ebook
Barnes and Noble: $10.99 ebook
After a couple of chapters of wondering where this book was going, I was pulled and then couldn't put the book down. It took a bit to figure out the characters and what was happening. The reader is hit with a bunch of chaos right off the bat and it requires patience for the issues to come to light. But if you are patient, the characters find their way into your heart and I was rooting for them all. Well all but Uncle Andrew. I didn't want him to get anything, but he was still a good, bad character.
Ariel was my favorite, but I aligned with her as she was a dreamer, the problem solver, the bridge in negativity.
I did love the sisters, Portia, Olivia and Coredila, but would love to read a follow-up book that includes their own stories.
There was a few major curve balls in this book that by the time I was sucked in, I was so transfixed that I was not prepared for them. They threw me and made it that much harder to put the book down for normal life things like sleep. I refuse to divulge them though!
This is a perfect book for a vacation read. It was light, happy and full of chaos. And of course, the family drama was fantastically written.
SUMMARY - Portia Cuthcart never intended to leave Texas. Her dream was to run the Glass Kitchen restaurant her grandmother built decades ago. But after a string of betrayals and the loss of her legacy, Portia is determined to start a new life with her sisters in Manhattan... and never cook again.
But when she moves into a dilapidated brownstone on the Upper West Side, she meets twelve-year-old Ariel and her widowed father Gabriel, a man with his hands full trying to raise two daughters on his own. Soon, a promise made to her sisters forces Portia back into a world of magical food and swirling emotions, where she must confront everything she has been running from. What seems so simple on the surface is anything but when long-held secrets are revealed, rivalries exposed, and the promise of new love stirs to life like chocolate mixing with cream.
The Glass Kitchen is a delicious novel, a tempestuous story of a woman washed up on the shores of Manhattan who discovers that a kitchen—like an island—can be a refuge, if only she has the courage to give in to the pull of love, the power of forgiveness, and accept the complications of what it means to be family.
