Reviews with content warning for Cancer - From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home

A beautiful and tender memoir to be savored.

When I purchased this book, I just thought it was a book of love and Sicily and food. I didn’t realize it was also a memoir of loss from her husband of cancer. When I began it and realized it was a true story, I was surprised. I haven’t ever been it Italy, and it just amazed me - this young girl going with friends (for school), to Italy and finding this kind of love. It is an amazing story. It does jump around in timelines, and at moments, I had to think about where I was, but I felt like it also worked.

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“Poetry would save me… In that moment, I realized why I had returned here to this island of stone: I needed a kind of salvation. I desperately wanted, even for a moment, to shake off the ever-present sadness and fill my spirit.” P117

“Because even in grief, motherhood made me show up. It was my salvation then and had been from day one.” P119

“I had come to think of my grief as a character in my life, something I had to get to know, befriend l, make peace with because it was bigger than anything I had ever known. It pulled me down and sometimes propelled me forward.” P188

“Those Sicilian almonds were nothing like the nuts in six-ounce bags… in the United States. They were a singular act of natural goodness. They reminded me that a thing can be tender or hard, depending on conditions and care, intended or otherwise.” P182

“I couldn’t help but feel that I, too, was being stirred and molded and shaped again. A grief metamorphosis… I had begun to filter out the unneeded parts of my life. Life was separating my curd from my whey. … cheese making, especially making a wheel of infused pecorino, is a lot like dealing with grief. It requires time, labor, attention. It also needs to be left alone for a time. It requires gentle hands but also strong intentions.” P222

“Saro’s love, his life, and his loss had forged me, softening me to life and strengthening me in the broken places.” P305

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dtodd's review

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emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

3.75

I was brought to this book having watched the wonderful Netflix adaptation, and although I found that Locke writes beautifully, the second half dragged too much as she talked about her summers in Sicily after her husband’s death. I was more interested in her relationship with her husband and their journey of cancer, which wasn’t such a focus of the book. Nevertheless, a good read, and a passionate account of love, loss, and good food!

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destheesquire's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

5.0

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aprilthelibrarian's review

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emotional reflective sad

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inked_in_pages's review

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challenging emotional hopeful reflective slow-paced

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katrod's review against another edition

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challenging emotional funny inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

4.0

*Trigger Warning*

This book is HARDCORE about grief. That’s on me because I didn’t read the synopsis; but I had no idea and had just lost a friend when I started reading this one.

I ended up finding a lot of beauty in seeing a written exploration of grief while I was processing my own, but enter at your own risk. This is not just a love story.

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mckeelyshannon's review

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emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

One of my favorite lines from this book was “But I had learned identity was prismatic, that belonging requires claiming.”

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bookbunny's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad medium-paced

3.5

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