Kitchens - always the centre of the family

Blurb:

With The Glass Kitchen, Linda Francis Lee has served up a novel that is about the courage it takes to follow your heart and be yourself.

A true recipe for life.  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 moved 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 in to 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 women 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.

Review:

A delightful story combining the ingredients of life namely betrayal, love, family, cooking, trust, and a little bit of magic to create a delight of a read.  Indeed it was everything this reader could ask for in a book.

I must admit that I did find the first two chapters confusing – the introduction and the start of the story proper.  There seemed to be little connection between them.  After that though the book took on a lovely pace and I was sad to finish this fantastic book.

The characters are wonderfully portrayed and allowed to grow throughout the course of the novel.  The same attention is paid to the lesser characters who all have a certain je ne sais quoi.  Even the lesser characters are interesting and written with a wry sense of humour.  There are some parallels between the older woman and the younger women of this book which are interesting.

Nothing is easy in this book, not for Portia nor for Gabriel.  As in life, they both experience many twists and turns throughout this book and for Portia it was also about her journey to regaining the pilot seat of her life.  Life is hard work but the results can be amazing if you only trust in it.  Follow your heart and live your dreams.

A feel good book with a bit more gumption than ordinary chic lit.  It was entertaining, light-hearted, cleaver, and quirky.  The love scenes are realistic and romantic.  The scenes between the sisters are equally realistic and show how sisterhood should really be.  The book cover is also rather gorgeous; and then there is the added bonus of the recipes at the end.  Do yourself a favour and rush out and get this one.

Full Disclosure: ARC received from Netgalley for an honest review.

I rated this 4 stars on Netgalley and 'I really liked it' on Goodreads (4 stars) and Amazon (5 stars).