Reader’s Lounge

Season to Taste,
How I Lost my Sense of Smell and Found my Way
By Molly Birnbaum
Ecco Books, 2011, $24.99
Twenty-two and passionate about all things food, Molly Birnbaum is on her way to a career as a professional chef. Her life feels like one big “prep,” with all the hours of devouring cookbooks, experimenting with recipes and preparing and serving food to family and friends. Just weeks before her entry into the Culinary Institute of America though, Birnbaum is hit by a car while running in a neighborhood in Boston. The impact of her body against the car’s windshield causes multiple injuries to her pelvis and knee. A skull injury destroys her sense of smell. Losing the ability to smell, she also loses the ability to taste…a crushing blow to an aspiring chef. How can she create in the kitchen without the ability to season to taste? Plunged into depression in spite of her physical healing, Birnbaum works her way out with a quest to regain her sense of smell. With dramatic research, including a perfume school in France and a flavor lab in New Jersey, Birnbaum discovers much about the sense of smell in general and her lack of that sense in particular. This memoir is filled with fascinating details about the science of olfaction and pheromones, but more than that, it’s filled with Birnbaum’s determination to recapture her ability to smell and her possibilities as a chef of the future. There’s a bit of romance, several sneak peeks at restaurants, tantalizing food descriptions and a popular food blog she named “My Madeleine.”

Barcelona Calling
By Jane Kirkpatrick
Zondervan, 2011, $14.99
Annie Shaw is working on her third novel. Novel number one was a hit and novel two bombed.

Novel number three is slightly underway, but Annie has lost her confidence. If only she could get Oprah Winfrey to notice her book and give it a word…that magical nod of approval that often sends a writer’s success spiraling upward. Annie enlists the help of her best friends in this quest for fame and fortune. As you can imagine, the road to that kind of recognition is not smooth, but Annie makes it impossibly rocky with her accidental destruction of property, her near arrest, overthe- top attorney fees, repair bills and well-deserved traffic tickets. Bringing an old flame from Spain complicates the whole mess. Add to the picture a new male editor with a secret past and the story has layer upon layer of love and laughter. This is a story of girlfriends doing what they do best…being there for each other. Jane Kirkpatrick is the author of many historical novels, so this contemporary story emerges as something light and fresh and pleasantly different in her writing.

State of Wonder
By Ann Patchett
HarperCollins, 2011, $26.99
State of Wonder takes readers deep into the heart of the jungles of Brazil and into a mystery created out of modern medical research. Dr. Annick Swenson has isolated herself for 12 years in the wild there, claiming to be close to creation of a fertility drug that will make millions for Vogel Pharmaceuticals, her employer back in Minnesota. Swenson has been relentlessly seeking the secret behind her discovery that the women of the Brazilian Lakashi tribe are able to get pregnant and bear children well into their 70s. Passionately driven and uncompromisingly eccentric, Swenson insists she has no time to pause her research and honor her employer’s need for communication and update for the board of directors and stockholders. Dr. Marina Singh, another research scientist with the company, is sent to Brazil to find Swenson and get some answers. Her quest is not undertaken without great reservation. Singh’s lab partner, Dr. Anders Eckman, never returned to his home and family from a trip to that testing and research site 6 months ago. Singh has also clashed with Swenson in the past, with life and career-changing results. The journey along the insect-infected land of the Amazon River is complete with devouring snakes, poison arrows, and a tribe of cannibals. The source of the fertility secret unfolds as something both plausible and fantastic. There will no doubt be conversation connected to this novel, concerning the ethics of drug research, experimentation and the exploitation of primitive cultures. The very consideration of pregnancy continuing long into the life of a woman brings up issues of health and welfare of mother, child and family.

About the reviewer:
Alexandra Fix is the author of ten non-fiction children’s books, including the series Reduce, Reuse, Recycle (heinemann Library). Over the years, she has truly enjoyed being a children’s librarian, registered nurse, freelance writer, mother and grandmother.