An engrossing story of grief, family closeness and stresses, secrets, and cooking. It poses the question of how far you will go to keep your remaining children safe when one of them dies suddenly.
This is an engrossing story of grief, family closeness and stresses, secrets, and cooking. It poses the serious question of how far you will go to keep your remaining children safe when one of them dies suddenly. When Gill and Gabe’s son Dougie dies suddenly thousands of miles from home, they are faced with the dilemma of how to tell their teenaged daughter Sylvie, seriously ill in hospital, that her beloved brother has died. Their fear that the news will kill her too means they take a risky and unorthodox approach to managing the coming months.
It was easy to empathise with Gill and Gabe and to understand their actions, but there are times you want to shout “Stop, don’t do that! You’re going too far!” Eventually it is Sylvie herself who finds the way to rebuild her broken family before another tragedy occurs.
The family interactions and verbal shortcuts, the memories and shared pleasures, are all familiar to anyone who has lived in a family unit. The youngest sibling Teddy’s list of the family’s unique language made me think of all my own family’s expressions over the years and smile. This is a book where you will recognise and savour the family ties, and probably be intrigued to try the recipes.
A wonderful book of family, food, love and loss. I adored it.
I was lucky enough to request and be sent a copy of this book by LoveReading and it’s fair to say that I was a bit dubious about the subject, as it deals with the aftermath of the death of a teenage boy. But once I’d started I couldn’t stop reading and absolutely adored it. I really didn’t want to put it down and when I did I found myself thinking about and missing the characters. I also took sneaky breaks from what I should have been doing to read a couple more pages.
While the book is obviously about grief and its impact on a family, the overwhelming emotion is always love – all the different kinds that exist within a family, how it can bring people together but also push them apart. It’s narrated by different members of the Jordan family who each deal with grief in their own way. My favourite character was 11-year old Teddy who feels it’s his responsibility to try to fix things while struggling to cope with what’s happened.
All the characters here, even minor ones, are real people that I wanted to reach out to. I was torn between racing through to find out everything I could about them, and wanting to take it slow and spend as much time with them as possible. I’m still thinking about them now. The book reminded me Jodi Picoult’s work, but I enjoyed it more than I have any of her books.
A beautifully written, deep and poignant book about loss and the various ways different people deal with grief within a family.
This is a beautifully written, deep and poignant book about loss and the various ways different people deal with grief. It is written from different familial points of view following the death in the UK of a teenager Dougie: Gill, his mother who is a food writer in Tasmania; her husband Gabe; their daughter, Sylvie, who has been a hospital inpatient with (rather ironically given Gill’s occupation) anorexia for several years; and their young son, Teddy; plus it also features Papabee, Teddy and Sylvie’s grandfather. Dougie died in a potholing tragedy whilst on his gap year and this sparks the title of the book as Gill begins producing recipes in a rather obsessive way linked to her grief. Meanwhile Gabe researches the accident, equally rather obsessively. As is so often when a family experiences tragedy, it can pull them apart, and the book explores whether they can come together again, especially given the secrets (e.g. what triggered Sylvie’s illness?) and lies (e.g. concealing Dougie’s death from her) that feature. Teddy’s character is a supreme delight. I recommend it wholeheartedly.