How fun is this cover?
Natalie Tan's Book of Luck & Fortune
by Roselle Lim
At the news of her mother's death, Natalie Tan returns home to San Francisco's Chinatown. The two women hadn't spoken in seven years since her mother refused to support chosen career as a chef. Natalie is surprised to find her old neighborhood is fading and businesses failing. She's even more surprised to learn she's inherited her grandmother's restaurant.
The neighborhood seer reads her fortune and tells Natalie she must cook three recipes from her grandmother's cookbook to aid her struggling neighbors before the restaurant can succeed. However, she resents the shopkeepers who left her alone to take care of her agoraphobic mother when she was growing up. Will Natalie be able to set aside her resentment and find the right recipes to make her restaurant successful?
From the very beginning of this book, I was invested in Natalie's story. Her relationship with her mother was complicated(as most mother-daughter relationships are) and it was sad that she didn't get to make peace with her mom before she passed. When she comes home, she discovers that her agoraphobic mom left the apartment and that is when she died and nobody knows why she went outside. This plus the fact that Natalie has never known what happened to her father and has never understood why her mother became agoraphobic in the first place set up a bit of a mystery for us to follow. The resolution of this mystery is quite wonderful but bittersweet.
When she first returns, she harbors resentment toward her neighbors for leaving her alone to take care of her mom while growing up. As she spends more time in the neighborhood, more of her childhood memories come back and she begins to realize that the neighbors were there in ways she didn't realize. Her relationship with her different neighbors was one of the best aspects of this story, especially her friendship with Celia, who runs a gift store. There is so much warmth and true affection there and it made me feel all warm and cozy.
There is also a love interest, who is drawn to Natalie when he smells the dumplings she's cooking. He's cute and sweet, but the affection there is a bit more insta-love than what I would prefer. The book is filled with magic, so I suspended my disbelief and accepted it as part of the magical realism.
Speaking of the magical realism, the descriptions in this book were so evocative. I felt like I could feel every breeze, hear the food sizzling, smell it cooking, see the magic unfolding. In that way, it sometimes reminded me of Like Water For Chocolate, which was the book that made me fall in love with magical realism almost 20 years ago. The language used was beautiful but not over flowery. One of my favorite passages is when Natalie visits the seer and discovers her hidden garden behind her tea shop:
"She closed her eyes. A rush of wind teased the leaves and stirred the blooms, releasing both fragrance and petals of varying size into the air, soaring, swirling like ethereal butterflies into the dark sky. Peonies. Jasmine. Tieguanyin. I drew the heady scent into my lungs, imprinting the memory of this moment into my consciousness."
Overall, I recommend this book. It was fun and heart warming. Just make sure you go into it knowing that you will have a strong craving for dim sum. It's worth it.
About The Author:
Roselle Lim was born in the Philippines and immigrated to Canada as a child. She lived in north Scarborough in a diverse, Asian neighborhood.
She found her love of writing by listening to her lola (paternal grandmother's) stories about Filipino folktales. Growing up in a household where Chinese superstition mingled with Filipino Catholicism, she devoured books about mythology, which shaped the fantasies in her novels.
An artist by nature, she considers writing as "painting with words."
http://www.rosellelim.com/