Review: The Kitchen Daughter by Jael McHenry

Goodreads: After the unexpected death of her parents, painfully shy and sheltered 26-year-old Ginny Selvaggio seeks comfort in cooking from family recipes. But the rich, peppery scent of her Nonna's soup draws an unexpected visitor into the kitchen: the ghost of Nonna herself, dead for twenty years, who appears with a cryptic warning ("do not let her . . . ") before vanishing like steam from a cooling dish.

A haunted kitchen isn't Ginny's only challenge. Her domineering sister, Amanda, (aka "Demanda") insists on selling their parents' house, the only home Ginny has ever known. As she packs up her parents' belongings, Ginny finds evidence of family secrets she isn't sure how to unravel. She knows how to turn milk into cheese and cream into butter, but she doesn't know why her mother hid a letter in the bedroom chimney, or the identity of the woman in her father's photographs. The more she learns, the more she realizes the keys to these riddles lie with the dead, and there's only one way to get answers: cook from dead people's recipes, raise their ghosts and ask them.

Kritters Thoughts: A heart wrenching roller coaster of emotions from complete sadness to a will to fight for what is right, this book is a journey worth taking. Told from the heart of a young adult woman who has lived with her parents her entire life due to her special "personality" or as we may now call it - Aspergers. A love for learning about the people who live with Asperger's, I am drawn to read books where I can inhabit their mind and learn their thought process.

Ginny, an older sister, yet always treated as special and probably less self suficient, I enjoyed the juxtaposition of her being the older sister, but in a different respect a younger sister too. As a sister, I find the research done on birth order and traits that dominate where you are in the line both intriguing and often times beyond truthful. I am the older sister of the pair and I do feel as though if our parents were to leave us behind that I would be responsible, even though my sister is married and has a family. As the first born it was born into me that I am to always take care of my sister and look out for her - how weird would it be to have our birth order remain the same, but the roles reversed. I can't imagine.

A book for the women readers - those who love to learn about a family's heartbreak and how they pull together to overcome obstacles, this was truly a great read. I can't wait to pass it on to both my sister and mom.

Rating:absolutely loved it and want a sequel

Pages: 272

Cover Challenge April-June: Initially Speaking