Book Review: Cinnamon and Gunpowder

Owen Wedgewood, chef to Lord Ramsey, spends his waking hours perfecting sauce recipes and testing the temperature of his ovens. Until the day pirates burst into the dining room right after the soup course, topple the platters of cherry-glazed roasted duck on their way to the table, murder Lord Ramsey, and carry Wedge off to sea on the Flying Rose.

His astonishing captor is Mad Hannah Mabbot, aka “Back-from-the-Dead-Red,” aka “the Shark of the Indian Ocean,” who sails the opium-flooded seas guided only by the stars and a moral compass that is, by all appearances, cracked. She has a thirst for vengeance, a sharp intellect, an iron fist, a tender heart, an alluring figure, and a highly-trained crew ready to sacrifice their last breaths at her command.

Cinnamon and Gunpowder
by Eli Brown
FSG, 2013
318  pages (hardcover)
Source: Own
Available
IndieBound
Powell’s

Her offer to Wedge: cook her one gourmet meal every Sunday, from whatever foodstuffs he can conjure on the ship, and she’ll let him live another week. Refuse, and he can walk the plank. Thus begins the walloping adventure that is Cinnamon and Gunpowder.

Wedge, who narrates the novel, is a serious foodie, and—perhaps deservedly—a little enamored of his own culinary skills. On the first Sunday in his new role as executive chef to the chief pirate, he serves his captor a cod fillet with all the trimmings, and is surprised when she orders him to join her at table.

Suddenly, I was ravenous. Not having touched food to my tongue all day except to sample, I allowed myself to enjoy the first real meal since my capture. I had removed the fillet from the pan while it will still glassy in the middle and it had continued to cook by its own heat to a gentle flake. Between the opaque striations, wisps of fat clung to the crisp potato breading and resolved upon the tongue like the echo of a choir surrendering to silence. The saffron warmed all together as sunlight through stained glass blesses a congregation, while the shrimp sauce waved its harlot’s kerchief from the periphery.

If he does say so himself. But Mabbot heartily agrees, leaving Wedge alive to outdo himself every subsequent Sunday. And while he’s getting creative with hardtack and limes, he’s beginning to realize that the captain is far more than a bloodthirsty pirate.

The papers would have us believe that Mabbot is, like some mythic squid, a peril that rises from the deep at random to pull ships down, a singular and senseless hazard. In fact she is but one character in a convoluted tragedy whose entire case seems to be comprised of villains. Even as we hunt the Fox, we are hunted by the navy and Laroche, who are in turn also after the Fox for undermining trade in the ports of China. The Flying Rose is a link in a chain of enmity that manacles the entire globe.

In fact, it soon becomes clear that the captain’s mission is much more justifiable than he could have anticipated, and his late master’s trading empire was a lot darker than he had realized. The more time Wedge spends with Mabbot and her crew, the more he finds his previously-untested ideals shifting to reflect the complexities of a world far bigger than his country manor kitchen.

That complexity is what makes Eli Brown a master storyteller. Hannah is a thrilling heroine, and Wedge is an endearing everyman, learning more about himself in a few months under duress than his previous decade of comfort. And the chef’s narrative voice is pitch-perfect: English, loyal, slightly superior, aghast at his circumstances but inventive in rising to the challenge, and firmly in control of his gastronomical metaphors. But the perfection of the story is how Brown combines all the plot points you want in a high seas adventure with a complex philosophical exploration that, by the last page, makes you want to take up your cutlass and shiver some evildoers’ timbers.

05. October 2013 by Mindy
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Book Review: The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle

In my high school and college years, I read a lot of books by and about the Puritans. These were English Protestants who were first called “puritan” in a pejorative sense because of their stance that the Church of England had capitulated too much to Rome, and many among them followed the teachings of John Calvin. Their separatist nature was one of many factors that led significant numbers of Puritans to emigrate to the American colonies. Among the most famous of these colonists was Jonathan Edwards, an influential eighteenth-century preacher.

Puritan writers were fervent, earnest believers who urged their readers to piety. And the books about these Puritans to which I was exposed held them up as role models, in some cases to an extreme. The general theme was that these people were closer to God than we are in modern life, and the closer we modeled our relationships and daily activities after theirs, the better off we were spiritually.

What I didn’t understand in my early encounters with the Puritans was that their writings were ideals, the way they thought life should be lived in relationship to God. Which is not the same thing as how they actually lived—not because they were insincere, but because they were no more consistent in matching their beliefs to their actions than anyone else is. This is something that the writers of the books about the Puritans should have stressed—but the ones I read were too infatuated with the same ideals and therefore perpetuated my false impression. More objective books certainly existed; I just hadn’t encountered them yet in my particular community.

I have since come to read history and theology very differently, and I no longer have a romantic view of the Puritans. But sometimes early impressions are hard to root out, buried as they are under the strata of ideas formed over time. The only way to reexamine these ideas is to take up the subject again from other points of view and let them wrestle in the back of your mind until the inconsistencies shake loose and come to the surface.

I wasn’t specifically looking to do any more reading on colonial America or Jonathan Edwards, but I was intrigued when I saw Ava Chamberlain’s newest book, The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle: Marriage, Murder, and Madness in the Family of Jonathan Edwards. I was familiar with Chamberlain’s work as an Edwards scholar (for personal reasons, I’ve read far more than my share about him), and I was surprised to learn there had been a number of scandals in the family. That’s when a light went off that this was one of those areas where I might need to challenge my assumptions.

So I dove in. And sure enough, her retelling of Elizabeth Tuttle’s life was not only a fascinating story, but clarified a lot of details about marriage, family and mental illness in colonial America. Though I had a complaint about form, I gave it a positive review over at The Discarded Image:

Those who recognize the name Elizabeth Tuttle know her only as the paternal grandmother of colonial theologian Jonathan Edwards, a woman her grandson was raised to forget because of her alleged failings as a colonial goodwife. Yet this same woman, two centuries later, was paraded by leaders of the eugenics movement as the paragon of genetic material, a woman whose descendants include an unusually high number of intelligentsia. And in between those wildly different portraits of her lie nearly 200 years of forgotten silence.

So who was the real Elizabeth Tuttle?

Continue reading at The Discarded Image…

16. February 2013 by Mindy
Categories: Reviews | 2 comments

Review and Interview with the author of Alys, Always

Alys Always by Harriet LAneLast July at The Discarded Image, I published a review of Alys, Always, British journalist Harriet Lane’s debut novel. The story opens with a bang, in a straightforward kind of way, but it soon becomes clear that the aftermath of this opening scene is going to fundamentally alter a number of lives—but whether for good or bad will be left to the reader.

Driving back to London from the countryside on an icy evening, Frances Thorpe comes upon a car accident. She can’t get to the driver, who calls to her saying her name is Alice and that she spun out trying to avoid a fox. Frances tries to keep Alice talking while they wait for the ambulance, but the trapped woman’s voice is getting weaker. When the paramedics arrive and set up heavy machinery to cut through the crumpled car, the police draw Frances away to take her statement, sending her home with a promise that they’ll be in touch. And when they call, they inform her that they did what they could, but Alice didn’t make it. Continue reading at The Discarded Image…

And that’s when Frances discovers who Alice was and decides to turn the tragedy into an opportunity for herself.

As the book unfolds, the psychological depths of Lane’s storytelling are revealed in surprising twists. I was so fascinated by the main character that I sought out the author on Twitter to get a little more backstory. And this week, just as the paperback of Alys, Always released here in the U.S., I posted my interview with Harriet Lane over at The Discarded Image. We talked about watching others’ lives from afar, choosing your own destiny, and whether or not Frances has really committed a crime.

The protagonist of Harriet Lane’s debut novel Alys, Always was remarkably good at putting me on my guard. She raised all sorts of fascinating questions about what motivates us when it comes to the narratives we tell ourselves and others about ourselves and others. So I was thrilled when Harriet agreed to chat a bit about the psychology of her characters and some of the experiences and observations behind the suspense. Continue reading at The Discarded Image…

12. January 2013 by Mindy
Categories: Author interviews, Reviews | Comments Off on Review and Interview with the author of Alys, Always

Book Review: The Twelve Rooms of the Nile

The Twelve Rooms of the NileWhat if? is such a tantalizing question, especially when asked in the form of an alternate history. As soon as I read the description of Enid Shomer’s debut novel, The Twelve Rooms of the Nile, advertised in The New Yorker as an alternate history bringing together Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert, I added it to my library hold list. And since it turned out to be a thrilling adventure driven by two compelling personalities, I had to review it for The Discarded Image.

Gustave Flaubert and Florence Nightingale both toured the Nile in 1850. No evidence suggests that they met during their excursions, but in The Twelve Rooms of the Nile, Enid Shomer imagines that they did. That both were wealthy Europeans requiring substantial provisioning makes it possible, if not probable, that they encountered one another somewhere along the journey.

What makes this potential encounter so fascinating, as Shomer imagines it, is that these two people are so unalike, their friendship so unlikely. These differences are the alchemy that conjures a brief but intense friendship responsible for launching both parties on the trajectory for which they are known today.

Continue this review at The Discarded Image…

 

10. December 2012 by Mindy
Categories: Reviews | Comments Off on Book Review: The Twelve Rooms of the Nile

What I Did on My Summer Vacation

It’s been a quiet summer at this URL. Though I haven’t been writing here, I seem to be doing more writing than ever. My first priority is the book reviews and essays I’ve been contributing almost weekly to The Discarded Image—a site dedicated to conversations about belief-changing ideas. I’ve also been providing editorial leadership to a group blog at the digital agency where I spend my days writing for clients. And I’ve been doing some research and editorial work on a few book projects (my own and others’).

So this brief message is to say thanks to all of you who still drop in and leave a comment. I’m still reading and thinking and writing, and I have some good changes planned for this space in the near future. Watch for updates soon, and in the meantime, please do get involved in the discussion at The Discarded Image—I’d love to see you there!

11. September 2012 by Mindy
Categories: My writing, News | Comments Off on What I Did on My Summer Vacation

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