The Summer Kitchen [Hardcover]

Karen Weinreb (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 7, 2009

When Nora Banks goes to answer the doorbell very early one November 1st, she thinks it must be a group of teen pranksters still out trick-or-treating. But it’s no prank—it’s the Feds, who have come to arrest her husband Evan for a white collar crime. Nora’s enviable, privileged life in the eighteenth-century house she’d quit her job to renovate to museum-quality perfection, is upended in an instant.

The Bedford wives close ranks against Nora and her children. Nora’s only support comes from her children’s nanny Beatriz. The two women bond to raise the boys as smoothly as possible while Nora goes back to work. Baking has always been her biggest passion, so she launches a business of her own, the Summer Kitchen. Tempted by the offer of an affair with one of the local husbands and thwarted by an alpha wife who actively tries to shut down her business, Nora has to reach into reserves she didn’t know she had to support her family and change her way of thinking about life, family, money, and romance.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"[The Summer Kitchen]... humanizes what society demonizes by taking the reader through Nora’s shaken confidence, loss of income, the immediate shunning of the community, her humiliation at the hands of the feds, and her attempts to shield her children from all of it. While there is, materially, no reason to feel sympathy for Nora, Weinreb has created a sympathetic character because she gives early indicators that Nora didn’t quite fit into that world in the first place. Weinreb sets a chilling tone when describing the dynamic in Bedford."  --Nancy Colasurdo, Life Coach, FOXBusiness

 

“Keenly observed, deliciously barbed, ...The Summer Kitchen is a novel for our time, one woman’s story of saving herself and her family from personal betrayal and financial collapse.  A terrific read!”--Kevin Baker, author of Strivers Row.

"The author’s astonishing willingness to implicate her main character ...places The Summer Kitchen above formulaic chick lit. Our questions thus go beyond “Will her baking business make it?” and “Will she sleep with the crooked lawyer?” to “Will she reconcile with her husband?” I turned pages greedily, eager to find out." --Jesse Kornbluth, HeadButler.com

"WOW! I am so impressed with the style and ease in which Karen Weinreb writes in her first novel...  The book takes us through the most horrible period of time for Nora but she discovers who she really is and how much inner strength that she has. She finds friends she never fully realized and that those she thought were friends were not. The Summer Kitchen is such a fantastic book I can’t wait to see what Karen Weinreb writes next." -Julie Moderson, Bestsellersworld.com

About the Author

KAREN WEINREB is a former journalist with degrees from Yale and Oxford Universities who wrote for newspapers in Australia. Weinreb worked at Random House in New York City, and was a researcher for Harold Evans’ The American Century.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; First Edition edition (July 7, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312379250
• ISBN-13: 978-0312379254
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #730,651 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Story was okay but the writing was awful, July 11, 2009

By 

BookDiva "BookDiva" (NJ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Summer Kitchen (Hardcover)

I waited two months for this book to come out, as I read in a magazine that it was written based on the author's own experience.

While the story itself was just okay, the writing itself was bad. It almost had a Jane Austen familiarity to it (not a good thing when it comes to chick-lit, which is pretty much what this book is). The sentences reminded me of the homework we would get in grade school - we had to unscramble a sentence and put the words into the proper sequence.

Here's an example of a sentence from the book:

"I booked the trip to Bermuda so that we would have the change to talk finally alone". (I swear, thats exactly how it reads).

This is pretty much the run-on of words, at least up until the Winter chapter, which is when I decided to return the book back to Barnes & Noble for a full refund. I really wanted to like this book, and try as I might, I just couldn't. The subjects, sentences and sequences ran into each other too often. I had no idea Nora was pregnant until the third chapter. Also, on the night the Feds come, Nora gets out of bed to shut the window because it's raining. Ten minutes later the moon is out and glowing through the window, ten minutes after that, the rain is "lashing", yet right after that when the feds arrive, the sky is turning yellow as morning comes. Forget about the nanny Beatriz. First she was living with the Bankses. In another chapter she has her own apartment, yet when the feds come, there's Beatriz sleeping in her old room. And please - if I read that Nora's husband Evan told the kids that mom was getting "cross" one more time, I would've thrown the book across the room. Who uses that expression anymore?

There was also way too much "filler". Who cares about Nora's mother and step-father, or the mud on the Range Rovers. I was falling asleep by the tenth page. The language in which the author continues to narrate had alot to do with that

I really did want to like it, but I just couldn't. If anyone has ever seen the movie "Far From Heaven", in which Julianne Moore plays a 50's housewife, you will know the "language" I am talking about. If you happened to like that movie - then you will love the way the author writes.

This would have been a much better story if the author had a better editor.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Bankrupt Mom Writes Really, Really Bad, October 13, 2009

By 

Delving Eye (New England, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Summer Kitchen (Hardcover)

If Karen Weinreb had the services of a competent editor at St. Martin's Press, her novel, "The Summer Kitchen," would have come in at two paragraphs, tops. That's how little plot there is.

She describes ad infinitum and ad nauseum ridiculous, unnecessary details. Do I really need to know that the heroine "held her son with one arm, her left, while her right arm held up out of the way an umbrella."? The entire spiel reads like the worst kind of romance dreck larded with awkward, heavy-handed narrative. Clump, clump, clump. Here comes the drudge.

According to media blurbs and Ms. Weinreb's own (revisionist?) account, she is a graduate of Yale and Oxford, having studied literature at both institutions. She was also a journalist before marrying. This is hard to believe. No journalist has ever concocted the kind of sentences Weinreb spouts, gems such as:

"Though the laugh, the day, it exhausted her." (p.21)

"Nora had been keeping up appearances for two months since the arrest when the exhaustion of the effort and of all she was now managing alone swelled to the feeling that a blood vessel would burst if she didn't rest." (p.65, opening of Winter, chapter 4.)

"... her boys' faces looked like adorable painted puppets, their cheeks and the tips of their noses blooded circles on complexions frozen otherwise white and stiff." (p. 99)

Good grief. Such is the tortured and tortuous treacle that passes for writing these days. Even in a hackneyed genre, has publishing really sunk this low?

Weinreb's overuse of adjectives and adverbs all strung together in hideous combinations that make no sense to anyone living and breathing and attempting to read this garbage interested at first though mindlessly later will drive one to drink or in some cases probably chuck said book across the room and upchuck. (Editors, please take note of that stunner and sign me up!)

One redeemable note: The book was displayed at a store in Bedford, N.Y., and one passerby insisted the storeowner remove the display, making quite a fuss about it, too. It seems she recognized herself, not very attractively portrayed, in the travesty she wished removed. Now that's a good story.

24 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A deadly accurate look at a scandal in a rich, snooty New York suburb --- written by a novelist who lived through one, July 7, 2009

By 

Jesse Kornbluth "Head Butler" (New York) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Summer Kitchen (Hardcover)

Home is a 26-acre estate in the Westchester town of Bedford, New York, where her neighbors are Ralph Lauren and Martha Stewart. But home is also three separate condominiums in Manhattan. Vacations mean Barbados. February is the annual clothes-shopping event in Milan. She drives a gold BMW X5.

And then her husband --- who has financed this extravagant life by bilking investors out of an estimated $12 million --- pleads guilty to wire fraud and goes to jail for a year.

That white-collar criminal's wife is a great character. Once rich, now poor. Once part of a power couple in a community where only couples count, now alone and scorned. How will she support her three young children?

But wait. That's no fictional character --- that's Karen Weinreb. How did she fix her life? She used what she'd learned studying literature and her experience at Random House, and wrote a 340-page first novel.

In the novel, Nora Banks --- Weinreb's stand-in --- is "the perfect Bedford wife and mother." High cheekbones. Long blonde hair. Glowing skin. An hourglass waist. Almond-sized diamond engagement ring. The icing? She's a gifted baker. "Much more Martha than Martha," a friend says. "You not only have a gorgeous husband --- you're not under house arrest."

But, really, at the start of the novel, Nora is shallow as glass. And, thus, not terribly likeable --- or is that just because I'm a guy who's often experienced women like her, at parties, looking over my shoulder at bigger game?

Nora is even less likeable on November 1st, when she thinks that the early morning knocking on the door means nothing more than overly zealous trick-or-treaters. Wrong. It's the FBI, come to arrest her husband.

What follows is a delicious social drama. Everyone drops Nora except for the kids' nanny, a bosomy South American saint who dispenses more wisdom than Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Oh, and her new friend, a sexually avaricious and larcenous lawyer who does everything but twirl his moustache. Not that she notices --- she's too busy working up a world-class hate on her husband.

If these were the only elements in "The Summer Kitchen", it would be a tawdry summer read, perfect for beaches slightly less crowded because of Bernie Madoff. Happily, Weinreb has a gift. Even better, she's savvy about people --- starting with herself.

I'm not spoiling the novel for you if I reveal there is an arc to the plot. It's a stunner: Nora realizes that her husband didn't act alone. She knew nothing of his machinations --- she wasn't his co-conspirator --- but she was the one with the hunger for things and trips and status. In his eagerness to provide all that for her, her husband --- a basically good man --- crossed the line.

The author's astonishing willingness to implicate her main character (and herself) places "The Summer Kitchen" above formulaic chick lit. Our questions thus go beyond "Will her baking business make it?" and "Will she sleep with the crooked lawyer?" to "Will she reconcile with her husband?"

I turned pages greedily, eager to find out.