A Place At The Table
*Disclaimer: This book was provided to me as a member of the Literary Junkies Book Club for the purpose of an honest review. I was not compensated for this post.
Happy Friday!!! Is anyone as excited as me to sleep in tomorrow and just relax? I can't wait. I am back today with a book review for you all. This one is set in NYC but has a heavy country hand involved. It's about three characters whose lives are intertwined in an incredible way. You'll fall in love with each of them, hate those are are cruel to them and wish all the success in the world for them. The book is called A Place at the Table by Susan Rebecca White.
What I Say
If I'm being honest, A Place at the Table started out really slow for me. The first half was a struggle to get through but the second half picked up significantly. Alice, Bobby and Amelia have a very interesting intertwined relationship that is very unexpected at the end. I thought that the story was good although not entirely clear until the last maybe fifty pages. A few things I really did enjoy were the Breakfast at Tiffany's references is during Bobby's part of the story. It's one of my favorite novels of all time.
Alice is an African-American woman who grew up in the South and while she struggled at first and had her rough spots, enjoyed great success at life. Bobby is a gay man from the South who tried to hide who he really was throughout his entire childhood, not even really understanding it himself. His brother was incredibly cruel to him and it took a very long time for his parents to accept him. It was his Meemaw that shared her unending love with him that eventually led him to a successful life in New York with heartbreak, accomplishments and a well-lived life. Amelia is a woman who was never truly happy. We meet her at the end of her marriage of twenty years to a man I personally wanted to slap. Never treated right, she moves her life to New York where she discovers secrets about her ancestors that no one would have ever guessed.
Overall, A Place at the Table was good but it was a struggle for most of it. I would recommend it just because I felt the story ended up very touching in the end. There are many issues discussed through this novel which I appreciated on an intellectual level. It was refreshing to read a novel of substance rather than something light without much meaning like Twilight. Because it took me a while to get into it, I can't in good conscious give it more than three stars but it was a worthwhile read in the end.
What Goodreads Says
A rich, beautiful novel about three unlikely, complex characters who meet in a chic Manhattan café and realize they must sacrifice everything they ever knew or cared about to find authenticity, fulfillment, and love.
A Place at the Table tells the story of three richly nuanced characters whose paths converge in a chic Manhattan café: Bobby, a gay Southern boy who has been ostracized by his family; Amelia, a wealthy Connecticut woman whose life is upended when a family secret finally comes to light; and Alice, an African-American chef whose heritage is the basis of a famous cookbook but whose past is a mystery to those who know her.
As it sweeps from a freed-slave settlement in 1920s North Carolina to the Manhattan of the deadly AIDs epidemic of the 1980s to today’s wealthy suburbs, A Place at the Table celebrates the healing power of food and the magic of New York as three seekers come together in the understanding that when you embrace the thing that makes you different, you become whole.