Sugar and Salt

A compassionate, moving story about two chefs from different worlds who join forces in business and love—their relationship tested by the past.

 

Lingering difficulties from the past simmer throughout Sugar and Salt, a compassionately poignant novel of domestic fiction by author Susan Wiggs.

 

Through a staggered timeline, Wiggs (The Lost and Found Bookshop) builds a romance between two characters who come from vastly different backgrounds: Margot Salton of Texas traveled a long, hard road to become an award-winning chef. As a teenager, she forged her own way in the world after her single mother--a talented cook--died. Tough, street smart and self-reliant, Margot was taken in--mentored--by a kind, hardworking African American couple, owners of an authentic Texas barbecue restaurant until a second tragedy upended Margot’s life. Determined to cut her losses and start anew, budding barbecue master Margot changes her identity and sets off, leaving Texas behind and winding up in San Francisco, Calif., where she meets Jerome Sugar, an African American baker who learned everything he knows from his warm, self-made grandmother, Ida. The single father of two operates Ida’s well-established, popular bakery, ‘Sugar.’ When Margot and Jerome work out a deal to share kitchen space, and she opens her own restaurant next door called ‘Salt,’ the two form a professional bond that leads to romance. However, when complications from Margot’s former Texas life resurface, the couple’s relationship is tested. Can love in the present survive far reaching tentacles from a sordid past?   

 

Hot-button issues from real life events inspired Wiggs to write this complex, thought-provoking novel that depicts how the power of friendship and love can overcome heart-wrenching challenges.

 

Sugar and Salt: A Novel by Susan Wiggs

William Morrow Books/Harper Collins, $27.99 hardcover, 9780062914224, 368 pages

Publication Date: July 25, 2022

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE

 NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (July 29, 2022), link HERE

The Luster of Lost Things

A gifted, fatherless boy with a communication disorder goes on a quest to save his mother's magical bakery.

Walter Lavender Jr. is a 12-year-old with a motor speech disorder, a brain pathway dysfunction that prevents him from producing the words he wishes to speak. Walter may be isolated and withdrawn, but over the years, he's learned to adapt and cultivate an uncanny sense of perception. This turns him into a sought-after expert at finding lost things. Despite finding other people's prized possessions, a great sense of loss marks Walter's own life. His father, an airline co-pilot, disappeared on a flight to Bombay just three days before Walter was born.

While he waits for his father's return, Walter skirts bullies at school and spends time at the Lavenders, his mother's eclectic bakery in the West Village of New York City. Devoted patrons believe the desserts are magical--the angel food cake is light enough to whisk away pounds, and carefully crafted marzipan dragons breathe fire. The centerpiece and good luck charm of the success of the bakery, however, is a treasured, leather-bound manuscript--an illustrated winter's tale of lost love. When the book goes missing, the shop takes a nosedive: the magic suddenly evaporates from the desserts, business drops off, a French bakery opens a few doors away and the landlord threatens to double the rent. Fearful that all will be lost, Walter commences his 85th--and most personally challenging--case.

With straightforward prose, Sophie Chen Keller tells this insightful story from Walter's singular point of view. This is a feel-good, message-driven story about the restorative power of human connectedness and how acts of kindness can ultimately change lives.  

The Luster of Lost Things by Sophie Chen Keller

Putnam (Penguin), $15.00 Paper, 9780735210783, 336 pages

Publication Date: August 8, 2017

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (September 8, 2017), link HERE