Book #74 |
Book: Family Reservations | Author: Liza Palmer | |
| Source: Free First Reads download Format: Kindle |
Pages: 303 | Duration: 08/17/25 – 08/18/25 (2 days) | |
| Rating: ★★★★★ | Genres: fiction, food, family, thriller | ||
| 📕10-word summary: A fragile family empire teeters on the brink of disaster. 🖌6-word review: Ambitious women in a delicious trainwreck. |
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| 💭A favorite quote: “There’s something particularly irrefutable about finding actual evidence of how truly clueless you once were. The blind hope of it just breaks your heart.” | |||
| 🎓Some new-to-me words: poissonier, patinaed, brassicas, kouign-amann, peloton, murmuration, izakaya, ayahuasca, cassava | |||
| Description:* Maren Winter is a world-renowned restaurateur who has built an empire. No one heeds the whispers of her retirement more closely than her three daughters, all in service to their mother’s legacy. On the night of Maren’s annual New Year’s Eve party, a line is crossed, and word of a humiliating family meltdown spreads like a Northern California wildfire through the culinary elite. It’s a golden opportunity for one of the daughters to step into power — and a trigger for a spiraling descent into paranoia and blind ambition. As the Winter family’s dissolution begins, so does a journey of competition, love, loyalty, self-preservation, and the need for three women to forge a path of their own.*From goodreads.com’s synopsis. | |||
| Thoughts: All 4 of the main characters are strongly drawn as 3 ambitious, headstrong daughters try desperately to get out of the shadow of their more ambitious, more headstrong mother. There are plenty of food-related adjectives that describe this tale: delicious, pungent, bitter, chewy, and satiating — to name a few. This is a strong candidate for a future Mostly Social Book Club choice for me. My only complaint about it is my pet peeve about the overuse of the word “conspiratorial,” which was used three times in this book. Ugh. | |||
See the rest of the books I’ve read in 2025 and previous years: 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019.
