Review by Booklist Review
A quirky yet lovable first novel tracks the feelings and not many actions of Gabby Fulbriten, an out-of-money divorcee with three children in Leadbelly, Vermont. Part cynic, part romantic, half optimistic, half forlorn, Gabby relates her tales of yearnings for a third husband, her fat-thin complex, and her perpetual struggle with a prepubescent daughter, all in a manner that many readers will identify with. Approximately 30 recipes punctuate Gabby's narrative, and lots of ellipses impede the flow, but the wit and the humanity of Stone's main character ensure that the reader will survive all structural cataracts. --Barbara Jacobs
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
What emerges from this engaging first novel is less a cohesive story than the wry, multilayered perspective of 37-year-old Gabby Fulbriten, a single mother of three who works as a grocery checkout clerk and lives in the ``wild country'' near the local dump in a small Vermont town. In an honest, intelligent and often hilarious first-person voice, Gabby narrates the odd vignettes and opinions that fill her life. She discusses quilting with her neighbor Hester; she flirts with Rolando, the garbage man; she helps Mr. Boots find his straying cows; she battles with her adolescent daughter, Shelley; she diets unhappily, while obsessing about food. Inventively woven throughout are fanciful recipes, hybrids of real ingredients and some surreal additions-Brandied Relationship Ring Flambé calls for ``spicy interludes, nutty remarks, juice tidbits''-that complement Gabby's many emotional turns. Also present are unnerving personal ads that point to the heroine's cynicism about, yet overwhelming desire for, a relationship: e.g., ``Macho hunk with brown hair and big biceps (green eyes) wants YOU! I get out of prison in June.'' Countless riffs on her trials and tribulations in ``husband hunting'' encompass too much of the novel; convinced of her own desperation, Gabby eventually considers becoming wife number two to the just-married Iggy Stains, a Mormon man she doesn't much like. But Stone's whittled prose successfully contains her character's dizzying digressions and often finds a lyrical edge in seemingly mundane details. 35,000 first printing; author tour. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Stone's first novel is about life in the climbing lane. Gabby Fulbriten, a single mother of three, lives near the dump in Leadbelly, Vermont. She is hungry-for life, for love, for fulfillment. To appease this hunger she conjures recipes using human beings, emotions, and states of being as ingredients. This and Shakespeare get her through her days of quilting, soul-searching, and work at the Hurry Up Market. Gabby is searching for meaning-a way to explain poverty, war, illness, loneliness, and death. She wants a man but fears the consequences of having one. She feels stuck but can't overcome the inertia that keeps her in place or the demands that drive her day. Stone's novel is frightening and funny, depressing and delightful. Recommended for popular collections.-Joanna M. Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island, Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., Providence (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A debut novel that's skimpy on plot but abundant in humor and plain truththe necessary ingredients in a blue-collar single mom's own recipe for survival. Gabby Fulbriten lives with her three children in the last house on the road to the dump in Leadbelly, Vermont. She works part-time in a grocery store and occupies herself at home by piecing quilts together, listening to Shakespeare plays on cassette, and contemplating the human condition, especially the condition of being an overweight, unmarried mother who's hoping for the right man to come rescue her from life by the dump. Not that Gabby suffers any real illusions about men. She's lived with a couple of them and watched each one go off and leave her with squalling babies, a sick old dog, and plumbing bills she can't pay. Now the men in her life tend to be garbage collectors or bill collectors or Mormon missionaries seeking to convert her. But Gabby never succumbs to self-pity. She puts everything into perspective by inventing mock recipes using the ingredients of her own liferecipes for things like Families on the Half Shell or Wieners 'n' Rage. Stone's writing is wonderful, blunt, and assured, and her Vermont setting, complete with plain-spoken neighbors, dump trucks speeding by, and cows mating in the next field, is fully evoked and believable as is Gabby herself. Finally, though, we wish for something more heresome turn of plot, some hint of change. Recipes are fine, but cooks know that what everybody clamors for is the finished productat some point you have to light a fire and let things fry. Funny and true, good and wry, but needs stirring. (First printing of 35,000; author tour)
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