Miss Cecily's Recipes For Exceptional Ladies - Vicky Zimmerman

Fiction

Rating: 9/10

The charming story of Kate, a young woman on the cusp of forty who is disillusioned and desperate to find meaning in her life. She dreams of being in a relationship where she does not at some point have to put pen to paper in order to make facts seem less unpalatable. 

Besieged by men who don’t know what they want and have no idea when they might figure it out, she decides that’s enough indecisiveness for her.  With a boyfriend flip flopping on commitment and a dead-end job meant only to pay the bills she finds herself keeping company with a cantankerous Cecily, a senior citizen with no shortage of opinions. 

As she becomes absorbed in a cookbook Cecily gives her, she slowly emerges into a life full of promise both in work and love.  The book pairs life’s moments, both poignant and ridiculous, with the proper meal. What shall one serve the man one hopes will stay on after dinner? The man one hopes will not? And so many more…

One of my favourite bits is when Cecily recites the ways in which aging is unglamorous; you can’t bathe without indignity, have gone decades without eating a worthwhile meal, everyone you loved has been dead for ages and you are consistently faced with the inhumanity of being starved of decent conversation.  Amen to that!

A gentle reminder that our elders have a bounty of experience and wisdom to offer, and that their frailty of body does equate to one of mind or heart. 

Book Pairing(s): Bookshop Of Yesterdays by Amy Meyerson, Lillian Boxfish Takes A Walk by Kathleen Rooney, Storied Life Of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin