Book Review: Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Book Review, Lessons in Chemistry

Shout out to my friend Ilene who recommended reading Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus. I thoroughly enjoyed the book! I’m always interested in the way authors switch points of view but keep the story moving forward, and Garmus does just that with chapters from many different characters’ perspectives. I find animal points of view particularly fascinating. We think we do, but do we really know what our pets are thinking? This a work of fiction so, of course, the main character Elizabeth Zott’s dog could think whatever Garmus imagined.

Did you know Zott’s dog Six-Thirty, a rescue, mixed breed dog, named after the time of the day he was found on the street, was inspired by the author’s own dog? Want to know more? Check out Dogster.com where Garmus answers questions about the connection between Lessons in Chemistry’s Six-Thirty and her dog Friday.

Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing as an average woman. But it’s the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute takes a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans; the lonely, brilliant, Nobel–prize nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with—of all things—her mind. True chemistry results. 

But like science, life is unpredictable. Which is why a few years later Elizabeth Zott finds herself not only a single mother, but the reluctant star of America’s most beloved cooking show Supper at Six. Elizabeth’s unusual approach to cooking (“combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride”) proves revolutionary. But as her following grows, not everyone is happy. Because as it turns out, Elizabeth Zott isn’t just teaching women to cook. She’s daring them to change the status quo. 

Laugh-out-loud funny, shrewdly observant, and studded with a dazzling cast of supporting characters, Lessons in Chemistry is as original and vibrant as its protagonist.

Goodreads

Quotes from Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Whenever you feel afraid, just remember. Courage is the root of change – and change is what we’re chemically designed to do. So when you wake up tomorrow, make this pledge. No more holding yourself back. No more subscribing to others’ opinions of what you can and cannot achieve. And no more allowing anyone to pigeonhole you into useless categories of sex, race, economic status, and religion. Do not allow your talents to lie dormant, ladies. Design your own future. When you go home today, ask yourself what YOU will change. And then get started.

Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun.” 

Some things needed to stay in the past because the past was the only place they made sense.” 

Take a moment for yourself,” Harriet said, “Every day.”
A Moment.
A moment where YOU are your own priority. Just you. Not your baby, not your work, not your dead Mr. Evans, not your filthy house, not anything. Just you. Elizabeth Zott. Whatever you need, whatever you want, whatever you seek, reconnect with it in that moment.” She gave a sharp tug to her fake pearls. “Then recommit.

Goodreads

Hon, did you read Lessons in Chemistry? What did you think?

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Batch Cocktails to Entertain with Ease, Elegant Lifestyles Magazine, April/May 2023

Batch Cocktails to Entertain with Ease

My second article published in the April-May issue of Elegant Lifestyles Magazine includes recipes and tips for batching cocktails. What are batched cocktails, you ask? Think pre-party preparation.

Interestingly, I learned that you can’t just multiply ingredients from a single-serve recipe because that doesn’t account for an ingredient that’s in most drinks–water! The water that results from melted ice needs to be accounted for, and the way to do that is to weigh a cocktail before and after dilution. Who knew?

Want to know more about batching cocktails in preparation for entertaining? Want to find out how to measure for the correct amount of water? Click Cocktails & Bars so that you can plan ahead in order to enjoy your guests in the moment!

Sources for the three batched cocktails featured in the magazine article:

• Lavender Lemon Bourbon Slushie Cocktail–Cocktail Contessa, Heather Wibbels
• Big-Batch Spiked Arnold Palmers-–Southern Living, Ivy Odom
• Fizzy Fruit Punch–Martha Stewart, Riley Wofford

Happy hosting, hon!

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20th Mansion In May Designer Showhouse and Gardens, Elegant Lifestyles Magazine, April/May 2023

The 20th Mansion in May Designer Showhouse and Gardens is about to open and, lucky me, this week media is invited to the ribbon cutting ceremony and preview! In preparation for writing a feature article about this year’s MIM, the premier fundraiser of the Women’s Association for Morristown Medical Center I, along with two of New Jersey Hills Media sales reps, toured the “before” estate. Looking forward to seeing the “after” at the 9,000 square foot Three Fields where rooms and grounds will be filled with creativity, innovation, and design!

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Moco Museum, Barcelona, Part 2

The Moco Museum in Barcelona displays its philosophy.

Call it Inspiration For All Creatives.

The Moco Museum in Barcelona exhibits a lot of KAWS.

Did you know…

Born in 1974 in New Jersey, USA, Brian Donnelly aka KAWS chose his creative nickname based on the visual interaction between letters.

Moco Museum

KAWS’ background…

KAWS is an American artist known for his toys, figurines and clothing brand solely based on a fictional character.

Donnelly started the concept of KAWS as a teenager, when he created KAWS tags and marked them on buildings and phone booths in New Jersey and Manhattan. 

Starting his career in New York as a graffiti artist, he often posted the KAWS logo on billboards, bus stops and phone booths in his neighbourhood.

He later graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and started working as a freelance artist for Disney, where he created 2D/3D backgrounds for Disney movies.

Lifestyle Asia

Quote from the artist…

I liked the fact that [KAWS] didn’t exist. It wasn’t a thing, just sort of lettering that worked. I liked the sound, like a short, strong mark.

KAWS

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Moco Museum, Barcelona, Part 1

Metamorphosis 2021 by Nick Thomm, 2-panel acrylic pigment ink, resin on canvas.

A year ago, my family traveled to Madrid and Barcelona to visit our daughter who was studying abroad. I’ve been thinking a lot about that trip and how much we enjoyed touring the cities and countryside. I found the Moco Museum in Barcelona interesting, interactive, and inspiring. Quotes seemed to speak directly to me–even for a creative whose mediums are words, clay and yarn rather than paint, resin, and fiberglass.

Accompanying the over 9 feet wide paintings above, the didactic wall panel says, “Metamorphosis is inspired by art lovers and the conversations we have. Oftentimes, when we encounter hypnotic fields of color, we want to jump inside or we feel the artwork pulling us in. Nick Thomm welcomes that natural urge and frames us in euphoric color. His vibrant tones have soul vibrations and make us wonder, what’s our aura color?”

Soul vibrations? Love. Aura color? What’s mine? What’s yours?

Untitled (Horse) 2012 by OsGemeos, Mixed Media, OsGemeos are identical twin brothers Otavio Pandolfo and Gustavo Pandolfo who work together.

We always think that a wall like this is a big canvas where we can share what we believe. Once you put it there, information, you share this information with everybody. You can change ideas. You can change people. You can give some hope. It’s very important. Every single line we do, it’s important.

OsGemeos

Diamond Matrix 2020 by Studio Irma, immersive exhibit with mirrored walls, ceiling and floor where diamonds seem to stretch to infinity.

As humans, we undergo great pressure. Yet, socially, failure is not accepted. Diamonds, made of carbon, go through incredible stress, to emerge as shining jewels and one of the strongest materials on earth. So can you. “

“This installation of hundreds of light-up diamonds expresses that we participate in a bigger picture, sharing more similarities than differences. Life is messy and hard, but it makes us stronger. Celebrate your indestructible shine. Who are the diamonds in your life?

Studio Irma

The Moco Museum, an independent museum located in Amsterdam has announced the opening of a new venue in Barcelona. The Netherlands-based Moco Museum said that the new satellite facility would open its doors for the first time by the middle of October 2021. The location of the new Moco Museum will be a 16th-century palace, Palacio Cervelló, situated in the heart of the bustling city of Barcelona, known for its art, architecture and distinctive culture. Founded in 2016 with a mission for attracting broader and younger audiences to art, the Moca Museum has always sought to make fine art more accessible to the public. As such, opening a new branch in another country is very much a part of its mode of operation.

Manuel Charr for Museum Next

Read Across America Author Event

Awesome Authors!

Guess what I planned at the preschool where I teach? Shout out to local bookstore Words and the directors of SJCC ELC for helping put together an author event to celebrate Read Across America! Shout out to my author-friends who will be reading to the kids. This week will be picture-book-review-week as I cover Ariel Bernstein’s I HAVE A BALLOON, Chana Stiefel’s BRAVO, AVOCADO!, Anne Appert’s BLOB, Robin Newman’s DON’T CALL ME FUZZYBUTT! and Rebecca Gardyn Levington’s WHATEVER COMES TOMORROW. Fun!

What is Read Across America?

The program was created by the National Education Association (NEA) in 1997 and is designed to encourage children of all ages to read, and to promote the love of reading among children. The program is celebrated in schools, libraries, and communities across the United States, and is often marked by special events and activities that center around reading and literature. The goal of Read Across America is to promote literacy and a love of reading among children and to encourage them to explore the world of books and reading.

Read-A-Thon

Book Review, Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

“A lonely woman discovers that sometimes humans don’t have all the answers.”

An octopus draws you in and his knowledge and insight about humans keeps you interested. Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt is a story told in several perspectives: the octopus’s, a widow’s, and a young man’s. As the story progresses, their lives intersect and collide, and their emotions and motivations are laid bare. Among the humor is death, grief, failure, stubbornness, shortcomings, resolve, and acceptance. I was incredibly moved by the ending, and I know I’ll be thinking about it for a long time.

Book Review

Tova Sullivan’s best friend is an octopus. A giant Pacific octopus named Marcellus, to be precise, and he is that—the novel opens with the first of several short chapters narrated in the first person (unlike the rest of the book) by the octopus himself, who can, as he points out, do many things we don’t know he can do. What he can’t do is escape from captivity in a small public aquarium in the fictional town of Sowell Bay, near Puget Sound.

Tova, too, has lived in the town for most of her life, in a house built by her father. At age 70, she’s stoic but lives with layers of grief. Her estranged brother has just died, with no reconciliation between them, and her beloved husband died a couple of years before from cancer. But the unsealable wound is the disappearance 30 years ago of her only child. Erik was an 18-year-old golden boy when he vanished, and the police, although they found no body, believe he killed himself. Tova does not.

She fills her days with visits with her longtime friends, a group of gently eccentric women who call themselves the Knit-Wits, and fills her nights cleaning at the aquarium. There, she prides herself on keeping the glass and concrete scrupulously clean while chatting with the inhabitants, although she saves her deep conversations for Marcellus. Lately she’s been concerned about the way he’s been escaping from his tank and cruising through the other enclosures for live snacks—and sometimes visiting nearby rooms, which risks his life.

Tova is too preoccupied to pay attention to the sweet but awkward flirting of Ethan, the Scotsman who runs the grocery store, but she does get drawn into the complicated life of a young man named Cameron who wanders into Sowell Bay. Although Tova and other characters are dealing with serious problems like loss, grief, and aging, Van Pelt maintains a light and often warmly humorous tone. Tova’s quest to figure out what happened to Erik weaves her back into other people’s lives—and occasionally into someone’s tentacles.

A debut novel about a woman who befriends an octopus is a charming, warmhearted read.

Kirkus

Quotes

“My neurons number half a billion, and they are distributed among my eight arms. On occasion, I have wondered whether I might have more intelligence in a single tentacle than a human does in its entire skull.” 

“It seems to be a hallmark of the human species: abysmal communication skills. Not that any other species are much better, mind you, but even a herring can tell which way the school it belongs to is turning and follow accordingly. Why can humans not use their millions of words to simply tell one another what they desire?” 

“Ah, to be a human, for whom bliss can be achieved by mere ignorance! Here, in the kingdom of animals, ignorance is dangerous. The poor herring dropped into the tank lacks any awareness of the shark lurking below. Ask the herring whether what he doesn’t know can hurt him.” 

Goodreads

Book Review, The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave is a beautifully-written, detail-rich, atmospheric historical novel. Though the story’s setting in 1617 Finnmark couldn’t be more different than that of the 21st century, grief, worry, family, religion, curiosity, power, accusations, betrayal, and love are timeless. I wanted to delve deeper into characters’ motivations and personalities as well as find out the thing that makes us turn the pages–what happens next? I only have one critique. The portion of the book which describes historical events might have been placed before the first chapter. Knowing the research done ahead of time would give this novel even more gravitas.

Hon, have you read this book? What did you think of it?

The Mercies Book Review

After a storm has killed off all the island’s men, two women in a 1600s Norwegian coastal village struggle to survive against both natural forces and the men who have been sent to rid the community of alleged witchcraft.

Finnmark, Norway, 1617. Twenty-year-old Maren Bergensdatter stands on the craggy coast, watching the sea break into a sudden and reckless storm. Forty fishermen, including her brother and father, are drowned and left broken on the rocks below. With the menfolk wiped out, the women of the tiny Northern town of Vardø must fend for themselves. 

Three years later, a sinister figure arrives. Absalom Cornet comes from Scotland, where he burned witches in the northern isles. He brings with him his young Norwegian wife, Ursa, who is both heady with her husband’s authority and terrified by it. In Vardø, and in Maren, Ursa sees something she has never seen before: independent women. But Absalom sees only a place untouched by God and flooded with a mighty evil. 

As Maren and Ursa are pushed together and are drawn to one another in ways that surprise them both, the island begins to close in on them with Absalom’s iron rule threatening Vardø’s very existence. 

Inspired by the real events of the Vardø storm and the 1620 witch trials, The Mercies is a feminist story of love, evil, and obsession, set at the edge of civilization.

Goodreads

Quotes from The Mercies

“I remember once when runes gave you comfort, when sailors came to my father to cast bones and tell them of their time to come. They are a language, Maren. Just because you do not speak it doesn’t make it devilry.”

“But now she knows she was foolish to believe that evil existed only out there. It was here, among them, walking on two legs, passing judgement with a human tongue.” 

“This story is about people, and how they lived; before why and how they died became what defined them.” 

Goodreads

Kids Kindness Project + Picture Book

I had the opportunity to meet art director and author/illustrator Ann Koffsky when I attended Highlights Foundation “Jewish Symposium 2022: An In-Community Experience for Jewish Creatives” in October. She wrote the adorable picture book What’s In Tuli’s Box? When I read it, I knew just how I wanted to tie it in with a preschool class project.

In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, our theme was Kindness. Our project? Tzedakah boxes! Prevalent in Jewish homes, Tzedakah boxes collect extra coins to be donated to those in need. What an important lesson, in addition to a hands-on, tactile activity, for preschoolers.

The children painted glue on containers, chose colors of tissue paper, and stuck the tissue paper to the gluey containers. They practiced dropping coins in the coin slots, listened it jingle, and discussed the kind acts that they–even as young as they are–can do.

Tzedakah is the Hebrew word for philanthropy and charity. It is a form of social justice in which donors benefit from giving as much or more than the recipients. So much more than a financial transaction, tzedakah builds trusting relationships and includes contributions of time, effort, and insight.

Learning to Give

Review of What’s In Tuli’s Box

In this charm­ing pic­ture book for young chil­dren, Ann D. Koff­sky presents the con­cept of tzedakah through the char­ac­ters of a kit­ten and her moth­er. With kinet­ic images and bright col­ors, chil­dren learn that a sim­ple box pro­vides not only an oppor­tu­ni­ty to climb and play, but is also a means to con­tribute to char­i­ty. The book’s sim­ple text mim­ics the way a child learns from her par­ents about an impor­tant mitzvah.

For par­ents and care­givers con­sid­er­ing the most effec­tive way to intro­duce the con­cept, Tuli the kit­ten pro­vides one answer: con­crete expe­ri­ences and few abstrac­tions. Tuli is as active as a tod­dler, and just as focused on explor­ing her world. Koff­sky begins with Tuli becom­ing inter­est­ed in a box labeled tzedakah. Nei­ther this nor its slit for deposit­ing a coin means any­thing to her. Through touch­ing, push­ing, and lis­ten­ing, she dis­cov­ers the box’s phys­i­cal qual­i­ties, while her moth­er offers more infor­ma­tion. The box is not a toy, she comes to find, although the clink­ing sound of a coin drop­ping would seem to sug­gest that it is.

Koff­sky com­bines feline and human char­ac­ter­is­tics with sub­tle humor. While the char­ac­ters look like real cats, their facial expres­sions of curios­i­ty and affec­tion, cou­pled with the mother’s pur­ple pock­et­book, add a dif­fer­ent visu­al ele­ment to the sto­ry. Gen­tle expla­na­tions from Tuli’s moth­er con­firm what the kit­ten has learned, but also extend the pos­si­bil­i­ties. Tuli is final­ly ready to hear that the coins are meant to help those in need. As moth­er and child rest their heads against one anoth­er, young read­ers fin­ish the book with a sense of sat­is­fac­tion. Tuli’s ener­getic activ­i­ty has become a path to empa­thy, and to the reward of her mother’s pride and love.

Emily Schneider for The Jewish Book Council

Times Square Ball Drop on New Year’s Eve

Image source: Patch: Midtown-Hell’s Kitchen, NY

Guess what’s now crossed off my bucket list?!

Watching the Times Square Ball Drop live on New Year’s Eve!

Watching the Ball Drop in person wasn’t actually on my list. The thought of being squished in a giant crowd is not my cup of tea. Every year as I watch the Ball Drop on t.v, I wonder why anyone would want to wait for hours on end to be in Times Square whether it’s clear, raining or snowing. To confirm that this was not something I ever wanted to do, I found myself in Times Square a bunch of year ago at the end of December. Cousins and our daughters got together to see a matinee and, though I’m not claustrophobic, I couldn’t get out of the packed-with-people streets fast enough. Hubby and I agreed that the only way we’d go to Manhattan on New Year’s Eve was if we had reservations at a restaurant near the festivities. This year, an opportunity came up.

Hubby found a promotion through United Airlines Mileage Plus and Visa Lifestyle Events–heavy hors d’oeuvres, open bar, dancing, and more at Charlie Palmer Steak. We stayed overnight at the beautifully appointed Conrad hotel. United Airlines threw in an Uber credit. We booked it!

On December 31, 2022, we drove into the city and passed thousands of people waiting in line. Security in the area was intense, so we had to show our hotel confirmation and restaurant reservations to be allowed through metal barriers.

We finally joined the New Year’s Eve party at Charlie Palmer’s where the restaurant was decked out in a 1920’s themes, flappers danced along with the guests, a woman performed acrobatics on an aerial ring, blackjack tables were bustling (people played for fun, not real winnings), a line formed to take photos at the photo booth, friendly people were ready to welcome in a new year, and there were even swag bags.

About 11:40 pm, the entire restaurant–patrons and the event and kitchen and staff–emptied into the closed-off street. There was the ball! We counted down from 10 to 1. Fireworks erupted immediately after. It was very exciting!

Hon, wishing you unexpected opportunities and happy surprises in 2023!

Boarding Passes: everyone at Charlie Palmer’s got one upon arrival.

Street View: city lights near Times Square.

Selfie Smiles: me and Hubby.

Toast to a New Year: champagne flowed.

Bright Light: the ball in person.

Fireworks Display: fireworks after the Ball Drop.

Crowd Control After Midnight: New York City police on horseback.