A Recipe for Family
Reviewed By Janet Mawdesley August 15, 2022
Author Tori Haschka.
Distributor: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 9781760857349
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Release Date: August 2022
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A Recipe For Family from Tori Haschka captures with aplomb, and a rather quirky sense of despairing humour, the very real world of the modern family, the working mother who somehow has to create magic daily to keep the family running smoothly, often with little or no help.
Stella Prentice is drowning in a world of ‘working Mum’, mother, step mum and wife to a husband who is a part time Actor and full time entrepreneur, who is away more than he is at home.
She has come up with a terrific idea to promote the Company she works for, Fresh is Best, for Mother’s Day and is wondering what she is doing wrong with her life, as she is simply not coping with anything at all.
The Mother’s Day event proves to be the catalyst which sets off a train of events that rapidly escalates, and no matter how Stella tries to change the course of the tide, it simply makes little or no difference.
When Stella’s friends talk her into getting the assistance of an Au Pair to help with the household management for four-year-old Natalie and teen Georgie, she feels some of the struggle may be over, but is it. Ava, young, impressionable and grieving for her mother, arrives into an already chaotic family, unaware of what she has really agreed to undertaking.
As the days unfold, so too does a delicate thread of a Mothers love for her only child, through the medium of a wonderful cook book and a lot of little envelopes, each one marked for an occasion where she may need some help. The first one Ava found was labelled For when you are sad. Each one also contained a special recipe for something they had made together.
Life in the Prentice household goes from bad to worse, with Stella’s contract failing to be renewed, Felix chasing funding for his latest enterprise, Georgie enveloped in full scale teen angst and Natalie, simply being four. What a mess.
Elsie, Felix’s mother is also facing her own issues with job loss, downsizing and the return of Jock, a man she had loved desperately in her younger years, wishing to return to her life. Now she has been ‘retired’, she is also grappling with where she fits in to Stella’s world of working mother,
When a real disaster happens, each one of the family has to face some very hard facts and begin to understand what is the most important thing to them, their family or some fragmented dream they are all chasing, each in their own way.
One of the many charming aspect of A Recipe For A Family is the heading of each of the chapters with a recipe title: Pear and Blackberry Buckle’ which was cooked at the Fresh is Best Mother’s Day event, can be located at the end of the book, along with the other recipes are dotted throughout the chapters.
A Recipe For Family is a slow burn for the first few chapters until you get events sorted and then gathers pace to become a very comfortable, easily relatable read. Great for an afternoon in.