Comfort Me With Apples

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A constant theme through restaurant critic Ruth Reichl’s memoirs Comfort Me With Apples is of food and cooking being therapeutic: it helps her go through difficult times, both professional and personal. Chocolate cake for when she can't figure whether to stay with the husband she is still so deeply attached to, or move in with her lover. Crab cakes for when she can't decide if she should take up a new job or not. Mushroom soup to help her and her mother get over the death of Reichl’s father. The food was another story--the story of food grew and she learned to navigate the world of being critic, which I found very fascinating. I look up to her food life so much, and I felt like I was learning and growing alongside her in this book. Sophia runs her hand over the place beside her where her husband so rarely sleeps these days and thinks it again, with as much joy: If Shakespeare set a scene in an orchard, you could be pretty sure that this was a metaphor for fecundity and wholesome passion. The only recent play set in an orchard that comes to mind is David Rudkin's Afore Night Comes in which the idyllic Worcestershire setting becomes a source of evil.

The cover art is perfect. The writers prose is perfect and the narrators voicing is, well...just perfect! So why does that drawer look so much like a filthy, ragged stranger standing suddenly in the corner of a brightly lit hall? It’s definitely apple season --- I like the kind that aren’t too sweet or soft, with real bite --- and this new fantasy novella has both the brightness and the incipient gloom of autumn. Sophia doesn’t ever want to get hurt. Or set one single soft foot where she is not allowed. What a thing to even imagine—just going right into a place he specifically told her wasn’t safe! She excises this paradox from her thoughts and replaces it with a pleasant anticipation of how lovely the cellar will be when he finishes it, how convenient and enjoyable she will soon find it to make all her little treasures in a space built just for her.Do you want to know? It will do you no good. It will not make you happy. It will not make one moment of what is to come easier on you. But ask me, and I will give it to you.”I knew it! I knew there was a reason why the idea of Homeowners Association always creeped me out. Agreeing to live by the rules of predetermined immaculate front lawns and any color of your home as long as it is white to beige, let alone in a community perfectly gated off from the rest of the world — well, it’s sinisterly creepy when taken far enough. I’d rather have a yellow house with a bright blue front door, thank you very much, and I think Valente feels the same.

On top of that her neighbours are extremely concerned for her happiness. It’s a constant refrain through Comfort Me With Apples. The people in this community seem too eager to please her. There’s a lot for her to work with: the Golden Apples (granting immortality) and the Apple of Discord in Greek myth, the poisoned apple given to Snow White by the evil queen, not to mention apples and apple pie as emblems of health and wholesomeness and the American way. Most familiar of all is the apple in the Garden of Eden. Devoured by Eve in pursuit of forbidden knowledge, then shared with Adam, it’s the sinful fruit that gets the pair exiled from paradise. Comfort Me With Apples is a furious and tantalizingly crooked domestic mystery, as slim and sharp as a needle.” —Melissa Albert, bestselling author of The Hazel Wood As always, it's tremendously difficult to talk about Comfort Me With Apples without giving away the whole game. From the jump, we ruefully laughed about how hard it would be to market a book with such a massive twist that we can only vaguely tell anyone what it's about beyond: You just have to read it. Trust us. The production qualities are of the very highest standard. Director Lucy Bailey ensures that what could be dry and rather dull never seems so. She is beautifully served by all five of her actors, none more so than Alan Williams.

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oh, i adored this. i feel like i have never read anything quite like this before, and that is something i find myself unable to say very often in 2022. this was fresh, and unique, and unsettling, and so, so, so smartly crafted and written - with such a haunting setting and atmosphere. And it came to pass after this, that Absalom the son of David had a fair sister, whose name was Tamar; and Amnon the son of David loved her… Comfort Me With Apples" by Catherynne M. Valente is a short novella that begs to be devoured in one sitting. Arcadia Gardens is tightly gated, the HOA rules and regulations are extensive including no overnight guests and tranquility hours after 10PM. Sophia is perfectly lovely, perfectly good, perfectly sweet and perfectly happy. "I was made for him"...but..."she wishes so desperately that she'd never done it...". This creepy, uncomfortable novella will make the reader squirm. A highly captivating read that is highly recommended.