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A review by knightreader1988
Eat Joy: Stories & Comfort Food from 31 Celebrated Writers by Natalie Eve Garrett
3.0
EAT JOY is a collection of food centered/adjacent essays written by well known authors where each entry is accompanied by lovely illustrations and a “recipe”. It is not a cookbook. You may pick up one or two ideas along the way but it includes basic recipes for things like white rice and brownie mix (LITERALLY packet brownie mix + water). Once you go into this collection with that in mind, you see what the editor set out to do in this volume and it becomes quite an interesting and offbeat book to explore.
The strong point of this anthology CANNOT be the recipes (obviously). For me it was a tie between the memories shared and the simple yet comforting watercolors of food that draped most pages. The book is divided into four sections under the themes of: Growing Pains, Loss, Healing, Homecoming. For the most part the authors who wrote for these sections delivered. However, admittedly some appeared to struggle to connect their food memory with a recipe and it sometimes felt forced. For some of the memories I speed read through because I could see the writer really didn’t put as much into it as some of the better stories there.
Overall, it was a solid collection with the usual drawbacks of presenting a mixed bag of entries. Some shone brightly and some could just have been edited out. The saving graces were that the strong entries were really great, the artistic pieces were appropriate and the themes tackled were timely and relatable (example mental health, death, breakups, family dynamics). If you are me and you don’t just eat to live, enjoy almost every cooking show out there and plan meals days in advance despite novice cooking skills, then give EAT JOY a whirl. It also makes for a lovely coffee table book that you can peruse even for the artwork alone.
The strong point of this anthology CANNOT be the recipes (obviously). For me it was a tie between the memories shared and the simple yet comforting watercolors of food that draped most pages. The book is divided into four sections under the themes of: Growing Pains, Loss, Healing, Homecoming. For the most part the authors who wrote for these sections delivered. However, admittedly some appeared to struggle to connect their food memory with a recipe and it sometimes felt forced. For some of the memories I speed read through because I could see the writer really didn’t put as much into it as some of the better stories there.
Overall, it was a solid collection with the usual drawbacks of presenting a mixed bag of entries. Some shone brightly and some could just have been edited out. The saving graces were that the strong entries were really great, the artistic pieces were appropriate and the themes tackled were timely and relatable (example mental health, death, breakups, family dynamics). If you are me and you don’t just eat to live, enjoy almost every cooking show out there and plan meals days in advance despite novice cooking skills, then give EAT JOY a whirl. It also makes for a lovely coffee table book that you can peruse even for the artwork alone.