THE VEGETABLE BUTCHER, a 5-star food reference & Goodreads Choice Awards 2016 nominee

The Vegetable Butcher: How to Select, Prep, Slice, Dice, and Masterfully Cook Vegetables from Artichokes to Zucchini
Cara Mangini
Workman Publishing
$29.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: The skills of butchery meet the world of fresh produce in this essential, inspiring guide that demystifies the world of vegetables.

In step-by-step photographs, “vegetable butcher” Cara Mangini shows how to break down a butternut squash, cut a cauliflower into steaks, peel a tomato properly, chiffonade kale, turn carrots into coins and parsnips into matchsticks, and find the meaty heart of an artichoke.

Additionally, more than 150 original, simple recipes put vegetables front and center, from a Kohlrabi Carpaccio to Zucchini, Sweet Corn, and Basil Penne, to a Parsnip-Ginger Layer Cake to sweeten a winter meal. It’s everything you need to know to get the best out of modern, sexy, and extraordinarily delicious vegetables.

My Review: I voted for this book in the 2016 Goodreads Choice Awards. I don't have a kitchen, and I still procured this cookbook for myself because I loved the title. I learned a lot from it, I loved the photos!, and the text was helpful and also slyly amusing.

Vegetables have always made up a large percentage of my diet, unrepentant carnivore that I am. I love them, except kale, corn on the cob, and sweet potatoes. Roasted brussels sprouts with tart Granny Smith apples! The yummiest! Cornbread stuffing with carrots, celery, onions, mushrooms, Northern Spy apples!! A meal for the goddesses. Cabbage steaks roasted (sensing a theme here?) with olive oil then dressed with brown mustard/balsamic vinegar sauce!!!

*drool break*

And now, for that longed-for day when I have a kitchen, I've got fresh ideas on how to prepare them. Gotta love that.

BEHOLD THE DREAMERS, 2017 Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

BEHOLD THE DREAMERS
IMBOLO MBUE
Random House (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$6.99 ebook edition, available now

2017 NEWS! THIS 5-STAR READ IS THE WINNER OF THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION!

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant living in Harlem, has come to the United States to provide a better life for himself, his wife, Neni, and their six-year-old son. In the fall of 2007, Jende can hardly believe his luck when he lands a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, a senior executive at Lehman Brothers. Clark demands punctuality, discretion, and loyalty—and Jende is eager to please. Clark’s wife, Cindy, even offers Neni temporary work at the Edwardses’ summer home in the Hamptons. With these opportunities, Jende and Neni can at last gain a foothold in America and imagine a brighter future.

However, the world of great power and privilege conceals troubling secrets, and soon Jende and Neni notice cracks in their employers’ façades.

When the financial world is rocked by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the Jongas are desperate to keep Jende’s job—even as their marriage threatens to fall apart. As all four lives are dramatically upended, Jende and Neni are forced to make an impossible choice.

My Review: I voted for this book in the 2016 Goodreads Choice Awards. I read somewhere on the internet that this just might be The Great American Novel. I agree.

My advice to someone like you is to always stay close to the gray area and keep yourself and your family safe. Stay away from any place where you can run into police—that's the advice I give to you and to all young black men in this country. The police is for the protection of white people, my brother. Maybe black women and black children sometimes, but not black men. Never black men. Black men and police are palm oil and water. You understand me, eh?

Nothing is more American, in my experience of being a life-long one, than rooting for the underdog. Nothing is more American than relishing, with unabashed schadenfreude, the fall of the mighty and greedy.

Anyone can go to the shop and buy anything and give to anyone, he told Liomi when the boy asked him for the umpteenth time why he couldn’t get even a little toy truck. The true measure of whether somebody really loves you, he lectured, is what they do for you with their hands and say to you with their mouth and think of you in their heart.

Followed by:

“That’s exactly the problem! People don’t want to open their eyes and see the Truth because the illusion suits them. As long as they’re fed whatever lies they want to hear they’re happy, because the Truth means nothing to them. Look at my parents—they’re struggling under the weight of so many pointless pressures, but if they could ever free themselves from this self-inflicted oppression they would find genuine happiness. Instead, they continue to go down a path of achievements and accomplishments and material success and shit that means nothing because that’s what America’s all about, and now they’re trapped. And they don’t get it!”

These two fundamental American character traits intersect in this well-crafted debut novel. (This is the author's debut novel, but I will bet large sums of cash money that it's not her first...this is an accomplished, polished, beautiful piece of writing and plotting, and it has numerous older siblings in the "recycle" folder on her hard drive or I'm your maiden auntie.)

Don't waste time reading reviews, go get the book and read it! Now! Quick sticks, possums, don't deprive yourselves of this pleasure.

THE PAUPER PRINCE AND THE EUCALYPTUS JINN, Usman Malik's World Fantasy Award-nominated mind-blowing novella

THE PAUPER PRINCE AND THE EUCALYPTUS JINN
USMAN MALIK
Tor.com Original
Free online read, or 99¢ on Kindle

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A fantasy novella about a disenchanted young Pakistani professor who grew up and lives in the United States, but is haunted by the magical, mystical tales his grandfather told him of a princess and a Jinn who lived in Lahore when the grandfather was a boy.

My Review: Robert Burns said it best when he wrote "To a Louse,On Seeing one on a Lady's Bonnet in Church":

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us
An’ foolish notion:
What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us,
And ev’n Devotion!

Sal(man) is a young academic trying to make his way in the vicious world of Boston academia. (The smaller the stakes, the nastier the battle.) His Pakistani immigrant parents live in a Florida trailer park with his paternal grandfather. His escape from the life of the parental units was studying mythology and folktales, an interest sparked by the stories his Alzheimer's-addled grandfather told him. One story in particular, that of the Mughal princess who ran a tea stall next to a tree that housed a jinn—an elemental being, not a "genie" as the Western bastardization of the Islamic culture's mythology created—tied to the royal bloodline of the Mughals. Legend had it that the jinn protected the princess, and the princess the jinn.

One fine day, according to Gramps (such a very American way to address a grandfather, eh what?), a young boy in the neighborhood climbed the eucalyptus tree and fell from it, to be succored by the princess. This was the ignition of a chain of events that forms the rest of the novella. The eucalyptus is slated for destruction; then lightning strikes it. Secrets. Half-truths and outright lies, misdirection and redirection and tantalizingly vague non-endings to unending stories. And an ending to this tale that made me glow with rapturous pleasure.

Sal explores Gramps's journal and many books after his death. It is an amazement to him that there are so many, since they weren't there when he went away to school and then began his career. It also astonishes Sal that his grandfather annotated the books in such an erudite and academic manner. The old man worked in a 7-11 after emigrating to the US in the 1970s! Who knew he had such thoughts!

The discovery of his Gramps's treasure trove is the next propulsive event in the tale's amazing unfolding. Sal is so riveted by the reading he's doing, all of it a deep inquiry into Islamic folklore, that his Anglo-Saxon girlfriend feels and is neglected. When Sal gets into Gramps's annotations so deep that he puts together a revolutionary cosmology that emerges from all the information, he is impelled to visit (for the first time in his life) Lahore, Pakistan, Gramps's native city.

I can't now go any further into the events of the novella because, for once, *I* don't want to give spoilers! *ME* the king of "yeah, so?" about them! But please listen carefully: This is the single best ending-cum-wrapup of a story I've read this year.

If that doesn't tell you enough to make you run right over and procure the story to read, you haven't paid me much attention. I am almost uniformly disappointed in endings. This one, not at all; in fact, the diametric opposite of disappointed.

To Usman Malik I offer a humble, grateful salam.

ESCAPE FROM MR. LEMONCELLO'S LIBRARY, Chris Grabenstein's terrific new series' first outing

ESCAPE FROM MR. LEMONCELLO'S LIBRARY
CHRIS GRABENSTEIN (Mr. Lemoncello's Library #1)
Random House Books for Young Readers
$16.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Kyle Keeley is the class clown, popular with most kids, (if not the teachers), and an ardent fan of all games: board games, word games, and particularly video games. His hero, Luigi Lemoncello, the most notorious and creative gamemaker in the world, just so happens to be the genius behind the building of the new town library.

Lucky Kyle wins a coveted spot to be one of the first 12 kids in the library for an overnight of fun, food, and lots and lots of games. But when morning comes, the doors remain locked. Kyle and the other winners must solve every clue and every secret puzzle to find the hidden escape route. And the stakes are very high.

In this cross between Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and A Night in the Museum, Agatha Award-winner Chris Grabenstein uses rib-tickling humor to create the perfect tale for his quirky characters. Old fans and new readers will become enthralled with the crafty twists and turns of this ultimate library experience.

My Review: Want to know something? I read this book *after* its sequel! Want to know something else? I hate reading Young Readers books! And guess what? No, you guess, c'mon! C'mon, please? Oh okay: I did NOT hate reading this book OR its sequel!

I know, right?

Chris Grabenstein writes for middle-graders like a middle-grader would, and I mean that as a compliment. He gets right into the mindset of a young person in a way that I don't see a lot of adult writers doing. He anticipates the questions a younger reader is most likely going to ask and, before they can even be posed consciously, leads the reader to the answer while making it seem they've gotten ahead of the author. That's quality writing for any age, let alone the finicky and detail-oriented 9-to-12 market.

MR. LEMONCELLO'S LIBRARY OLYMPICS: Goodreads Choice Awards 2016

MR. LEMONCELLO'S LIBRARY OLYMPICS
CHRIS GRABENSTEIN (Mr. Lemoncello's Library #2)
Random House Books for Young Readers
$16.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five, for the storyline mostly

The Publisher Says: Welcome, boys and girls, readers of all ages, to the first-ever Library Olympiad! Kyle and his teammates are back, and the world-famous game maker, Luigi Lemoncello, is at it again!

This time Mr. Lemoncello has invited teams from all across America to compete in the first ever LIBRARY OLYMPICS. Will it be fun? Like the commercials say. . . HELLO? It’s a Lemoncello! But something suspicious is going on . . . books are missing from Mr. Lemoncello’s library. Is someone trying to CENSOR what the kids are reading?! In between figuring out mind-boggling challenges, the kids will have to band together to get to the bottom of this mystery.

Now it’s not just a game—can Mr. Lemoncello find the real defenders of books and champions of libraries?

My Review: I voted for this book in the 2016 Goodreads Choice Awards. I like Chris Grabenstein, a Twitter acquaintance. I like Mr. Lemoncello a lot. And the anti-censorship message of this book makes it a shoo-in for my eternal love.

The fact that this is aimed at a middle-grade audience prevents me from discussing the writing. I'm the grandfather of a high-schooler, I got nothin' ta sez bout that becuz don't know anymore. But from my lofty vantage of being closer to 70 than I am to 40, I can say that I enjoyed this fun and breezy read. Its message is one I want all kids to absorb. If I had the spondulix, I'd send three copies to every school library in the US.

THE HOTTEST GAY MAN EVER KILLED IN A SHARK ATTACK: Goodreads Choice Awards 2016

THE HOTTEST GAY MAN EVER KILLED IN A SHARK ATTACK
Rosebud...I mean, DOUGLAS HACKLE
Who the Hell Knows?
$9.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Ever since he was a young orphan, Hansel Higginzshire’s dream has been to break the long-held Guinness World Record for hottest gay man ever killed in a shark attack.

Big Problem #1: Hansel is not hot. At least not in the classical sense. In fact, the deformed man has a head the size of a wrecking ball.

Big Problem #2: Hansel digs chicks, not dudes.

Still, that shouldn’t stop a big-headed mofo from dreaming big, no??

But if those obstacles weren’t enough to impede Hansel’s path to Guinness World Record greatness, he finds himself wanted for murder. Now on the lam, his situation pretty hopeless, Hansel agrees to die a horrible death in a snuff film for just few measly bucks.

But perhaps the misfit companions Hansel meets on his westward cross-country trek to Hollywood—Rosebud (the drunken, down-on-its-luck, former actor, and sentient sled from Citizen Kane); a living, talking amputated arm that once belonged to a famous rock drummer; and a geeky keytar player born with a small polar bear head instead of a human head—can convince Hansel to follow his dreams again and attempt to become . . . THE HOTTEST GAY MAN EVER KILLED IN A SHARK ATTACK!!!

(By the way, yo mama is a character in this book. Yeah. For real. Sorry.)

“Hackle may be the best absurdist story writer working today.” —Bradley Sands, author of Dodgeball High

“Douglas Hackle is a 100% certified Angus all-beef patty genius.” —Danger Slater, author of Puppet Skin

My Review: I voted for this book in the 2016 Goodreads Choice Awards as a Humor category write-in. So should you, for the same reason you should watch that TV show where Nick Jonas plays a gay MMA fighter: Isn't it about time that cishet men pandered to the gay men of the world? They've been pandered to by women for-fucking-ever; their turn to do the pandering! C'mon boys, take it all off, get it on with someone you don't really want to, and suck (!) it up sex object.

I mean, fair's fair, amirite?

The Goodreads Choice Awards first round of voting ends November 6th.

WATERS OF VERSAILLES, Kelly Robson's beguiling novella of fishes out of water

WATERS OF VERSAILLES
KELLY ROBSON
Tor.com original
Free read online

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A charming novella of court intrigue in 1738 Versailles as a clever former soldier makes his fortune by introducing a modern water system (and toilets) to the ladies of the palace. He does this with magical help that he may not be able to control.

My Review: This is what fairy tales should do, make the world shimmer with magic and stir the reader's spirit to singing a song as right and true things displace the brummagem and the mundane.

Just go read it! Or step over to Amazon and get the Kindle edition.