Customer Reviews

The Kitchen Congregation: A Daughter's Story of Wives and Women Friends

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It is in the kitchen, the heart of a house, that women share their wisdom and their lives, while they are fixing chicken soup or lemon chess pies, often over coffee(with a child or two wandering around banging on things). And it is in the kitchen that everything important is learned and passed on. Nora Seton writes with incredible grace and beauty and makes you very very glad to be born female. "When I miss my mother," Ms. Seton writes, "I miss her in the kitchen." This is a book to buy for all your women friends and family members. A book to cherish.

Writing is a touch one gives another, a sharing of a theme, a passion. It is a thread that loops itself around another's eyes and then back again. And when the writing is nonfiction, when it is a memoir, it brushes a page with the inside of a writer's heart.

Nora Seton's heart is painted in the color of onions and leeks and golden mushrooms. It is molded in an oven that warms her kitchen, as it had warmed her mother's, her older friend's, younger friend's and as it will warm her children's one sad day, with her looking on, sitting at a table sipping tea. Nora isn't really musing about friends and women. She isn't telling us details of her life for our edification. She isn't giving us a self-important collection of words. No, this writer is teaching us a way of life. Her hopeful, positive feel for the world of women, anchered in food and nurturing, is invigorating. She uses a thin thread, perhaps one made from the skin of onions, to connect the old to the new. She shows us how eternal our femininity is, how women march forward but never leave the basics. She shows us the wisdom of the elders and compares it to the bitterness of youth and then allows us to find her thread that weaves it all together.

The voice is charming, for it is a voice of hope and joy. It slows painfully during horrid moments (the stillbirth of a first pregnancy), but it drives on elegantly. It is this hopeful song that sings in the background, as the thread weaves and drifts, that makes us read and feel good about who we are.

It should be read in the kitchen with Bach playing in the background, children at one's feet, and an onion waiting to be cut sitting in clear view.

BRAVO!

I read much of it on an airplane, and cried (discretely) throughout. The guy sitting next to me thought I had a stinking cold. This is a chicken soup for the soul book. Filled with warm textural stories within stories. I am a "hard sell" when it comes to books like these...don't like to be told how I should be feeling, and I think Nora did a good job of leaving us to decide for ourselves. Not a lot of the common childhood "let me drivel about what happened to me when I was a kid" trauma-shocker type stuff that I run across a lot in contemporary novels like this, and I appreciate that Nora chose not to go there with this book. It is a very finely CRAFTED book. I noticed how carefully every word was selected - much like picking just the right peaches for your Mom's peach pie recipe. -A wonderful tribute to her own mother, and a clear sign of good things to come from Nora.

I was altogether captivated by Nora Seton's novel The Kitchen Congregation. It is a touching account of the author's relationships throughout her life. I was struck at how often she described a moment in her life that recalls or suggests something that I have felt or experienced in my own life. She uses her mother as her primary muse.She reflects on their relationship through the simple tasks preformed in the kitchen. Her prose couldn't be more thoughtful and the effect is incrediably moving. She describes the exact way that I have felt, only with eloquence.

We (women) recreate our childhoods in our kitchens. We bring to it everything we remember as good, pushing the bad and unhappy aside. It is where we gather, not to cook like the "little hommaker" but to nuture and to nourish. Nora Seton has drawn together some remarkable memories of her mother, intertwined with stories of friendships and insights gleaned during time in other kitchens, as well as her own. Friendship with Senta, the older woman who invokes angels to assist her, and who accompanies the author through one of life's most difficult journeys. Ida, sharing hard won insight into the precarious balances struck by women and men. Seton writes of a good friend contemplating divorce. Much of what is important in life is discussed as she moves through the comforting, numbing, sustaining work in her kitchen. Friends gather at the table, gaining physical sustanance. More importantly, they sustain one another, continuing a thread established by others long ago....women gathered in the kitchen. Meals are prepared,regrets expressed,dreams unfurl and unravel, recepies for food and life are shared, husbands analysed, lives discussed, children intrude and are gathered in, we tend to rehearse amd inspect what is most precious in tandem with the mundane. Never is Seton more elequent, then when writing about loss. The loss of a parent, a child, the bloom of love, the tolerence of marriage,the dreams of youth, all these are brought to the table in distilled form, after simmering over a low flame, stirring and tending, until the clarity remains. Nora Seton has crafted a remarkable book of her continuing journey in the kitchen, seeking sustanance. I was moved and comforted by what the book brought to me (it also sent me looking for the novels her mother wrote, a wonderful tribute).

I have recommended this book to my friends who love reading and find joy in the perfect phrase. As soon as I finished reading this book, I started it again. The descriptions of friendship, raising children, cooking and best of all mothers are gifts to the reader. I hope I am able to find Nora Seton's first book.

This evocatively written book is a meditation on life, cooking, kitchens and relationships. I was touched by the author's honesty and her discerning and reflective eye. It's the kind of book that becomes, like a good friend, someone who is not afraid to speak the truth and share their vision of life, warts, joys and all.

The book does not read like a linear story but is rather like a poem where the ebb and flow of images and reflections transports the reader into the author's memory. That place where stories, sensations and the touchstones of experience are lodged. What is wonderful about this book is that the author's approach triggers memories in the reader so that the reader feels they're a member of an extended 'Kitchen Congregation'.

I enjoyed meeting Ida, Senta, Cynthia, Molly, Laura, Dr Rodgers, visitors in Seton's kitchen. Because Seton generously shares her memories, the reader feels that they have known these visitors too.

Whereas speed and convenience reign in this modern age, Seton's book reasserts the importance of the kitchen as a place to prepare, nurture, reflect upon, and experiment with, not only the cooking of meals but also,life's journey. My only criticism of the book is that I found the author's use of imagery and metaphor a little overdone at times. But all in all, a book to be savoured and experienced many times over. Beautiful!

This is the overwhelming feeling that you will get from this book! How many times have I sat at my grandmother's table, my mother's, a friend's? Just as much as they have sat at mine! And there is aways something to share, to learn. Nora, thank you for sharing the wisdom you've gathered from others.