Here’s my latest book review. Stay tuned for a contest announcement to give you the opportunity to win a free copy of the book!

Book Review: Harlot’s Sauce:
A Memoir of Food, Family, Love, Loss, and Greece by Patricia Volonakis Davis

Too many memoirs have a very self-indulgent feel to them—a very “woe is me” tone. Harlot’s Sauce is not one of them. It is well-written, easy to read, and has a knack for sinking you into the physical setting of where the story is taking place—from New York to Greece. In addition to being entertained, I felt like I got a taste of Greek life beyond what you experience at a local Greek festival!

I especially liked the explanation in the beginning of the book of a “hyphen-American.” Though I’ve known people who fit that category, it was always a perplexing phenomenon to me until now! It’s also an important precursor to understanding some of the motivations of the central “characters” in the book.

The “Explanations and Apologies” chapter at the end of the book (similar to an epilogue) expressed candor unlike what I’ve seen before and also answered one of my troubling questions that stayed on my mind as I read the book: How did Nick feel about how his father and other relatives were portrayed? At times I wondered if truth or anger was influencing how the characters came across. The flip side of that is that this book didn’t feel whitewashed for fear of angering people!

Patricia moved from being rather dependent to rather independent, and I was impressed to see her inner strength emerge through her various trials. I wonder how Patricia is doing now, how her second marriage is different from her first, and where her career took her after returning to the U.S. I’d also like to know how Nick fared as an adult, after his somewhat non-traditional childhood. I hope there will be a sequel.

This is definitely worth the read! I finished it in two days.