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 Mars Room

A gritty, authentic fictional account of a 29-year-old mother serving two consecutive life sentences at a Women's Correctional Facility.

Rachel Kushner (The Flamethrowers) paints a dark and gritty picture of the U.S. prison system and the larger, contemporary world in her provocative novel, The Mars Room. The action is set at the fictional Stanville Women's Correctional Facility, in the remote Central Valley of California. A diverse cast of inmates--hardscrabble women who formerly lived on the margins of society, suffering from poverty, abuse, neglect, drug addiction and sex exploitation--are forced to adapt and make a life inside prison walls. 

The central protagonist is Romy Leslie Hall, a 29-year-old inmate and former lap dancer at the Mars Room, a notorious, seedy strip club in San Francisco. Romy is serving two consecutive life sentences for murdering a man who relentlessly stalked her. 

Romy--bright and well-read, despite having grown up in unseemly conditions--has a young son, Jackson, who becomes entangled in the child welfare bureaucracy. Although prison separates Romy from Jackson for four long years--and she is ultimately stripped of her rights to find him--her desperate longing and love for him endures. She goes to great lengths to learn more about his status and track him down.

Romy's tragic, hard-luck story is one of many explored in a complex novel that keeps readers off-balance yet fully immersed. Supporting characters and their sordid proclivities and recidivism--along with subplots about an incarcerated dirty cop and a sensitive teacher at the prison--provide an unflinching look at brutality and power plays within the perimeters of razor wire--and beyond. 

The Mars Room: A Novel by Rachel Kushner

Scribner, $27.00 Hardcover,  9781476756554, 352 pages

Publication Date: May 1, 2018

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 (May 18, 2018), link HERE

Saltscapes: The Kite Aerial Photography of Cris Benton

In Saltscapes, Cris Benton, retired professor of architecture at UC Berkeley, has focused his camera upon the southern end of San Francisco's historic South Bay—the site of salt evaporation ponds that are being restored to tidal wetlands and marshes after a century of industrial salt production. For ten years, Benton researched and was intrigued by the history of these landscapes right in his own backyard. He hiked the salt-pond levees and took photographs of the region. Sky reflections from the earthbound perspective, however, did not do justice to his attempts to capture the confluence of snowy-looking white salt, marsh grass and mudflats. Therefore, Benton began to experiment and decided to attach his camera to a kite.

The book details, in fascinating depth, how he developed his gear and the various prototypes that led him to successfully master Kite Aerial Photography (KAP). Mounting his camera to a radio-controlled kite, Benton has photographed the region from heights up to three hundred feet. This unique, bird's eye vantage point produces distinctive images that peer straight down into the water and the land to reveal unexpected, breathtaking color saturations, textures, shapes, details and form that go beyond what the eye can discern from the ground.

In the foreword of the book, image comparisons are made to the abstract expressionist paintings of Mark Rothko and Benton, himself, pays homage to the artist. This collection of stark, striking photographs visually engage spatial sensibilities and illustrate exciting, fresh perspectives of a largely unexplored American territory in restorative transformation.

Saltscapes: The Kite Aerial Photography of Cris Benton by Cris Benton

Heyday, $50.00, Hardcover, 9781597142472 , 176 pp

Publication Date: December 1, 2013

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Note: This review is a reprint and is being posted (in a slightly different form) with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (12/17/13), click HERE