Daughters-in-Law by Joanna Trollope

If you’ve sensed a more sinister undertow in Joanna Trollope’s recent work, you are not alone; several of her readers have lately observed that her stories have been growing darker in tone and theme. It’s not an unpleasant evolution. It gave rise last year to the complex and thoughtful The Other Family, in which a middle-aged musician dies suddenly, leaving behind his long-term partner and their three daughters . . . and at the other end of the country, his son and the wife he never got around to divorcing, who has all manner of legal rights conspicuously unavailable to his ‘current’ family.

This kind of splendid, slightly saucy set-up has long been Trollope’s stock in trade, with her stories, centred as they are on the torments of the middle class, once earning the nickname ‘Aga saga’. Though she remains a devotee of the domestic drama and familial interactions in nearly every form, she never seems to be repeating herself: every Trollope adventure is a fresh one.

So to Daughters-in-Law, the title alone perhaps sparking a frisson of anticipation in any woman who’s ever married into a family and wondered how on earth these flawed and fallible individuals could be related to the spouse she loves.

Anthony and Rachel Brinkley are the parents and in-laws – living peaceably and affluently in contemporary Suffolk, they have produced three strapping sons, all now adults. The elder two, Edward and Ralph, are married, to women of whom Rachel is fond; the wives, Sigrid and Petra, are smart and self-possessed but biddable, and have made grandparents of Rachel and Anthony.

As the novel opens, the last son, Luke, is marrying Charlotte, a woman much younger than her sisters-in-law, and beautiful, privileged and utterly in love. Rachel finds herself, as they say, ‘acting out’, unable to quell her fear and hurt as she watches all three sons forming homes of their own, thinking now of their childhood home as simply the place where their parents live. It’s not an un-close family, but even regular contact is not enough for this matriarch, and her misguided desire to redraw the boundaries, and thus reclaim her sons, is almost primitive.

Matters come to a head at a family dinner when, in a grievous display of rage and spite, Rachel fulfills Anthony’s unspoken prediction that her reaction to the third marriage would ultimately become something akin to volcanic.

It might be surmised that it is not only empty-nest syndrome that sparks Rachel’s visceral reaction to the entrance of Charlotte; the ‘loss’ of her children to other women brings into harsh relief the extent of her husband’s affectionate detachment. The spectre of Luke and Charlotte’s mutual adoration may be the last straw for a woman learning that some of the passion she has invested in her sons might have been better directed elsewhere.

Daughters-in-Law, with its slow-burn approach to the familial and its examination of the complexities of relationships within a single family, is some of Trollope’s best work yet. (A particularly absorbing element of the novel is the author’s drawing back of the veil on each marriage.) Long may she linger at the Aga.

3 / 5 stars: Another fine drama from an authority on fraught families. Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

Left Neglected by Lisa Genova

It could be a question for a Stage 1 philosophy tutorial: what happens when a juggler, whose life, family, stability relies on their deft handling of innumerable balls, loses awareness of the existence of the entire left side of her body?

The audacious premise of Lisa Genova’s subtle Left Neglected rests on a condition known as Left Neglect, a neurological syndrome that occurs due to damage to the right hemisphere of the brain. The damage can be caused by stroke, haemorrhage, or traumatic brain injury, and it is the latter that is experience by Sarah Nickerson, a mother of three with a demanding corporate career whose use of a cellphone while driving in heavy rain up-ends her life.

Genova deftly builds towards the catastrophic moment with punchy chapters that capture the frenzy of Sarah’s life. If you didn’t know better – the blurb sets it up – you’d assume she was in for a collision with a classic case of burnout. As the vice-president of human resources at a fictitious consulting firm operating in 40 countries, she is ambitious to the point of lunacy, setting her sights on a promotion to president within two years.

Every minute of the day is scheduled, and in many minutes she is required to do two or even three things at once. She prides herself on her mastery of time, even as she contemplates the sensation of a split personality and is plagued by dreams of losing pieces of her own body. She loves her husband and children, but they are scheduled in too, she has no choice: among the mountainous financial obligations are mortgages on two homes.

The irony, as Genova presents it, is that it is only when Sarah is forced to stop that her life might truly begin. The scenario is almost comical: waking up in hospital eight days after the accident, she hears her husband’s voice but cannot see him. It is not until he moves from the chair on her left that he enters her field of vision. Sarah is amused rather than horrified – she is not capable yet of realizing that she has lost awareness of her left side, because her brain doesn’t register that ‘left’ even exists. Items on the left side of her dinner tray are invisible to her; she doesn’t know she possesses a left arm or leg. When she tries to read, the text on the left side of a page registers as blank whiteness.

It is when the full meaning of Left Neglect hits home that Sarah starts to grapple with what her new, unplugged life might look like, and it’s nothing from which she can Blackberry her way out. What could be mawkish is handled by Genova with a sharp, keen eye for the human response to loss – Sarah experiences denial, anger, every step in the process of grieving as she works to discover how much of her old life can be reclaimed, and precisely what it is she wants back.

Passages describing her rehabilitation reveal both the extraordinary implications of such an injury and the pains Genova has taken to portray the experience of living with Left Neglect. The frustration of relearning to walk, toilet oneself, control a traumatized body’s tics and tremors is conveyed with understated power. It’s an impressive journey by both women.

3.5 / 5 stars: A delicate rendering of disability. Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

The Shelly Beach Writers’ Group by June Loves

Already a top-10 contender for the 2011 award for Book With The Most Self-Explanatory Title, this first work of adult fiction by Australian writer June Loves is an achievement in several less obvious ways. In crafting this tale of Gina, a “barely 50-something” corporate high-flier who finds herself bundled out of her business and marriage in one fell swoop and chances upon a new life in a close-knit beachside community, she tells a touching, diverting story that steers a wide berth around the sentimental.

A Shirley Valentine character who becomes her own rescuer, the wry eye Gina casts on her washed-up existence proves not only her saving grace but one of the best qualities of the novel. Next-door’s officious tween, Terri (who has apparently memorized every line of the instruction manual for guests of the beach house where Gina is staying) earns her an unvoiced nickname:

Friday 10 July

Bossy Child called after school to check how the Dog and I were progressing. ‘Did you remember to feed the Girls?’

‘Yes, I did. Proof – no dead chickens lying in the henhouse.’

Rolled-eye look from Bossy Child . . . We sat on Adrian’s front verandah and watched the rain as it pelted down. Bossy Child reminded me to tell Alf the verandah guttering was leaking and needed repairing. ‘Did you check the leak in Bedroom One? Was there any rainwater in the bucket?’

‘Yes. Just a few centimetres.’

Bossy Child loves to ask questions.

The diary-entry style and tight span of a mere five months give a peppery pace to what could easily slip into the torpid – in a sleepy beachside community full of retirees, city escapees and general oddbods, days can slip by uneventfully, but Loves’ trick is to look for the amusing in the routine. She almost invariably succeeds.

The aforementioned manual (written by Adrian, the cottage’s owner, who is partial to making cat-among-the-pigeons return visits to Shelly Beach) contains instructions relating not only to the upkeep of Gina’s ramshackle temporary abode and its animal occupants, but also myriad community responsibilities. When you live in Shelly Beach, Gina learns, you do not live alone. Moreover, you pitch in. Among her duties, aside from the convening of the titular group, are voting on the Shelly Beach Action Committee, organizing fundraising events for a writers’ festival, and mastering the tricky lock on the door of the local hall.

Each discovery of a new task – either from a Bossy Child update or a reminder email from Adrian (Gina’s tendency to overlook the obvious, bless her, explains the ease with which her slimy ex-husband relieved her of her personal wealth) – prompts an exclamation of ‘bloody hell!’ and a swift display of extreme competence from Gina.

By the time a couple of Shelly Beach months have passed, it is clear that the trajectory of Gina’s return to a life better than the one she lost will be rapid and marked by only minor turbulence and a host of eccentric supporters. Should Loves be so inspired, there is plenty of scope for a salty sequel.

3 / 5 stars: You will like to be beside the seaside. Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

The Brightest Star in the Sky by Marian Keyes

Ah, the delightful Ms Keyes . . . as her constant readers know, plunging into one of her tales is like listening to the life story of a great raconteur in a pub where the drinks flow freely. She once said that “all her books are a comedy about something serious,” and indeed, her reputation (established over the course of 23 million copies of 10 novels since 1995) is as a writer who can peer at humanity’s dark spots while persuading you that we might just be all right in the end.

Most of the cast of her new novel, The Brightest Star in the Sky, reside in an apartment building at 66 Star Street, Dublin. Matt and Maeve, who occupy the ground-floor flat, are to all outward appearances blissfully married, though the relationship had a messy start, with each having to disentangle from a significant other. (At what price?.)

Jemima, ancient, wise and intolerant of the idiocy of youth, lives one floor above. In the flat above Jemima reside Lydia, a sassy taxi driver and her homesick Polish flatmates, Jan and Andrei. The men are alternately terrified of and frustrated by Lydia, who refuses to lift a finger in service of household cleanliness, on the grounds that she already does too much of it. (But where?.)

The uppermost floor is home to career woman Katie, who as we meet her is engaged in a tense discussion with her corporate raider boyfriend Conall, who doesn’t live with her and who believes that the best way to resolve conflict with any female is to open his wallet.

Thus the stage is set for break-ups, trysts and the dusting off of each apartment dweller’s closeted skeletons. The novel’s conceit is that someone, or something, is watching over the characters and looking to settle in one of the apartments, and is on a tight schedule – the story opens on Day 61 and an unexplained countdown begins. For readers with an aversion to magical realism or pseudo-religious hyperbole, fear not; the author, never fond of nonsensical plot tricks, doesn’t try any here.

Keyes has written powerfully about her personal battle with alcoholism and chronic and severe clinical depression, and shortly after this book was published (it hit the UK market in 2009) she wrote of being crippled by a depression so bad she was unable to eat, sleep, read, write or talk. Cruel as it is, her personal suffering has vested in her a profound talent for marrying light-hearted and clever comedy with sombre themes – her most recent previous book, This Charming Man, substantially addressed domestic violence.

True to form, it emerges in The Brightest Star in the Sky that an ostensible daily vitamin regime is in fact a dose of anti-depressants, and that a seemingly happy-go-lucky character is reeling from the aftereffects of rape. Keyes likes to remind us that most pain is pedestrian – so common and ordinary as to be unremarkable – and that no one gets through unscathed: the skill lies in just getting on with it.

3 / 5 stars: Sparklingly sassy. Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

13 Rue Therese by Elena Mauli Shapiro

By turns witty and grave, with a powerful sense of the absurd, French writer Elena Mauli Shapiro’s debut novel 13 Rue Therese plunges its reader into a world of war and human longing via a box of mementoes uncovered by a dry-witted American academic, Trevor Stratton.

As he sets about picking away at the mysteries held by each artifact – photographs, notes, letters and cards, even obsolete coins – so unfurls the story of Louise Brunet, her life through both world wars, from young love quickly lost to marriage and infidelity. (Though the Louise of the novel is an invention, there was a real Louise Brunet who lived in the same Paris apartment building as Shapiro when the author was a child – when she died, Shapiro found a box of keepsakes in her apartment.)

The author has plainly delighted in the narrative possibilities afforded by a box of secrets and an intelligent, adventurous and conflicted protagoniste: even as a guilt-stricken Louise frets over the emotional state of her besotted, needy husband, she drops erotic notes to be discovered by her attractive (and married) neighbour, in a bid to provoke an affair.

Despite the potentially maudlin nature of several elements of the tale – Louise and her first cousin, Camille, embroiled in a transgressive affair and separated by the Great War, Camille writing impassioned missives from the gangrenous trenches and Louise penning a Dear John letter that Camille may never read – Shapiro’s descriptions of her characters conspicuously lack sentimentality, and so convey much of life’s messiness.

Take this pithy portrait of Louise’s father, who expires from heart trouble in 1944: “If you were a romantic, you would say: he died of a broken heart. He was, after all, a widower. His wife died when his daughter was born – in 1896. It was a very, very slow broken heart. Maybe it took so long because it kept getting half-mended by the young women he hired to tend to his children.”

Elsewhere, the description of an real Great War photograph is lyrical, sensitive . . . and a little bawdy, as Shapiro analyzes the body language of one soldier, the “mincing fellow in the middle – you can tell just by the jaunty tilt of his cap and the limp wrist on his right leg, crossed tightly over the left – just from looking at this, you can tell the man is queer.”

Of the same image, she muses over the men’s puttees: “In the trenches, they sleep in these. They never take them off – never unwind the bindings. Did you know – each roll of this bandage around the shin is an incantation – truly a binding ritual, meant to keep the meat on the bone.”

In its necessarily speculative nature, 13 Rue Therese reminded me of Kate Mosse’s very good 2009 novel The Winter Ghosts, in which a young man arrives unexpectedly in an isolated, snowbound French village in 1928 and uncovers old tragedies. In both there is a nod to poststructuralism: only so much is fact; it is for the imagination to account for the rest.

For lovers of historical romantic fiction that is devoid of cheesiness, dedicated to authenticity, and amusing and touching in equal parts, it can get no better. 13 Rue Therese is a treat, a triumph and an exceptionally exciting debut.

4 / 5 stars: Torments and treasures mark a Frenchwoman’s stunning debut. Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

Rescue by Anita Shreve

Few human actions are so taboo as a mother’s abandonment of her child, but when the chilling moment comes, halfway through Anita Shreve’s patchy family drama Rescue, all the reader can feel is relief: at least the little girl is safe, for now.

The scene is as inevitable as it is dreadful. Sheila drives away, banished to an unknown and distant location after causing a car accident that injured herself and Rowan, her small daughter with paramedic Peter Webster, who goes by his surname. The crash occurred because Sheila was drunk, but this is no surprise – the couple met when Webster pried Sheila, intoxicated and near-unconscious, out of another smashed vehicle three years before.

Sheila spells Trouble. She’s an alcoholic with a sketchy past that she refuses to discuss with the enamoured Webster, but no matter. Shreve’s blanks have a way of filling themselves in, and when Sheila’s ex-boyfriend, a police officer, turns up to demand money he claims she owes him, the picture starts coming into focus.

From this encounter we learn that Webster is, to put it kindly, a problem-solver; his way of dealing with the problematic cop is to pay him off. He’s also a quick learner, opting to bite his tongue when ineffectual admonitions go unheeded by his alcoholic girlfriend, and taking action only, finally, when she threatens something he loves more than himself.

Webster, by far Rescue’s most interesting character, is opaque, and his motives for embarking on a certain ill-fated journey with Sheila are unclear, at least at first. Perhaps it is a saviour complex – he does after all spend his working life in and around ambulances, and Shreve peppers the book with detailed episodes of medical emergency – or curiosity, or boredom or a lack of love. Once Sheila’s unplanned pregnancy is discovered, another purpose for Webster’s behaviour is suggested: “This was risk. Risk of the most dangerous and wonderful kind.”

Webster is a vicarious gambler, personally and professionally, and Sheila is a chancer drawn to authority figures and seeming safe havens. Such function-dysfunction can work, but here drives a well-signposted wedge that challenges the couple to confront (separately, one off-stage) their attraction to danger.

The book is weighty with misfortune, and I’m still not sure what Shreve intended Rescue to be: a cautionary tale? A portrait of a broken family? A lesson in loss? It is far from uplifting – in addition to the heavy-duty main plot, the constant calls on Webster’s paramedic skills put paid to that – but despite its maudlin moments, the hopefulness that blossoms in the later pages alleviates the torpidity that afflicts some middle passages.

Though she has had notable successes, the most prominent being the Oprah’s Book Club pick The Pilot’s Wife, I wonder if Shreve’s constant readers will find what they are looking for in Rescue, or if the narrative might have benefited from longer gestation; the novel ends just as Sheila is finally acquiring some dimension.

Shreve’s conceit is to create a dramatic schism between a couple, give them more than 15 years apart and then, with another combustible plot turn, reunite them and find out if they’ve learned anything. In this fiction, people grow more interesting with age.

2.5 / 5 stars: Less weighty than it aims to be.  Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

Red Wolf by Liza Marklund

Published in Sweden in 2003, Red Wolf is making its debut in English in the same year that her latest novel, The Postcard Killers, written in collaboration with James Patterson, reached the number-one spot on the New York Times’ bestseller list (making Marklund the second Swedish author, after Stieg Larsson, to attain that position).

Like the majority of the writer-journalist’s crime novels, Red Wolf chronicles the adventures of the tabloid journalist Annika Bengtzon, who, after a brief sabbatical from daily reporting, has opted to become an independent investigative reporter for a major Stockholm tabloid, with a focus on terrorism and its history and consequences.

Having made a few routine reports on 9/11, covered the bombing of a shopping centre in Finland, and interviewed survivors of the Bali bombings, Bengtzon wants to sink her teeth into a knottier, less publicized act, and the (fictional) 1969 attack on the F21 military base near the Swedish city of Lulea proves the ideal case.

Though dual investigations of the incident, in which a fighter-plane exploded and caused fatal burns to a young conscript, were conducted at the time by police and security police, every suspected Swedish left-wing group remained untouched, and the attack was blamed on Russian paramilitary forces.

However, the inability of investigators to penetrate Sweden’s activist underground, combined with the unsavoury treatment of the victim’s family, which was placed under a gag order and denied compensation, left a cloud over the incident which an eager Bengtzon finds all too enticing.

Her hunch about a cover-up appears confirmed when she learns that a veteran journalist in Lulea, Benny Eklund, has been killed in a hit-and-run – days after he published an article about F21 and terrorism. She tracks down a young witness to the incident whose evident terror is justified when he is found murdered in his home a short while later. Bengtzon’s dogged digging goes on, and more bodies pile up.

It is no giveaway to say that subtlety is not Marklund’s great talent – though, in fairness, one never knows what has been lost in translation. Her strengths are structural – the pacing of Red Wolf is top-notch – and in the development of dramatic tension, though here it is a pair of familial sub-plots that snatch the reader’s attention, making the resolution of the F21 mystery the less satisfying part of the story.

You see, Bengtzon is a workaholic with two young children and a put-upon husband, Thomas, who is finding the charms of a sympathetic colleague hard to resist. Separately, Bengtzon’s best friend Anne is drowning her grief over her ex-husband’s remarriage and baby-on-the-way in too much wine.

Swedish crime writing has a distinct flavour, set as it often is in the frozen hinterland of the Arctic nation; more than most crime writers, the likes of Henning Mankell, Larsson and Marklund seem to enjoy taking their reader on a tiki-tour of outlying, snow-bound villages in pursuit of their investigators’ prey. While Marklund’s writing might lack some of the depth and resonance of the others’ work, she has in Bengtzon an appealing and versatile protagonist whose tenacity makes Red Wolf a satisfying Scandinavian adventure.

 2.5 / 5 stars: Stimulating Swedish shenanigans.  Click here to view more Easy Mix book reviews.

Hand Me Down World by Lloyd Jones

Lloyd Jones, evidently fond of a large canvas, has chosen to follow Mister Pip with a novel that sweeps from Tunisia to Berlin as an African hotel maid tracks the child she bore as the result of a terrible deceit.

The tracking is literal: Ines, the name adopted by the maid, is predator-like in her concentration and resistance to hardship as she journeys through southern Italy in search of the boy she produced as an unwitting surrogate. The fragmentary early part of the novel is occupied with others’ encounters with Ines – a chess player, a sleazy truck driver, a group of hunters.

In Berlin she settles, finds work caring for an elderly blind gentleman and forms a pact with the father of her child, the full weight of which Jones reveals only gradually. The novel’s most absorbing passage is written from the perspective of Defoe, a New Zealand researcher who joins the Ines-Ralf household to serve as the gentleman’s ‘eyes’, reporting aloud what he observes on their daily walks.

Ines’ service in this regard was insufficient, Ralf tells Defoe: “Today in Tiergarten, I asked what she could see. She said, ‘Trees. People.’ It could be China or the Amazon. I don’t speak Spanish or whatever it is she professes to speak. Her English is that hotel English you’ve heard from her. Whole phrases from the hotel lobby flow out of her . . . “

The slow-burn structure, and Jones’ flinty prose, keep the reader at a distance, in what might be a deliberate strategy by the writer: just as other characters approach Ines with caution, trying to make her out, so we must dance around her, seeing her through the eyes of others, before the narrative at last shifts to her perspective.

And if one has trouble responding emotionally to Ines’ plight, perhaps that reflects her own detachment. She has no feeling to spare on her journey towards her son, and later in the service of the appalling deal she must strike to gain sporadic access to him.

Her stoicism prohibits both love and pity, yet her obvious need, her fervency and sureness of purpose invite charity – from hunters in the hills of Italy as she makes her way to Berlin; from Defoe, who allows her thefts from their mutual employer to go unreported as he becomes entangled in a quasi-commercial liaison in which Ines seems to hold the balance of power. (A brief passage, once Ines has ended their affair, in which Defoe makes an unexpected finding, is supreme in its subtlety and precision.)

The fears of the wife of the child-thief, as she realizes that no obstacle is too great for Ines, emerge later; it is this woman who embodies the terror that we want Ines to have felt, but suspect she may be too strong to either admit or reveal.

Hand Me Down World is a novel of unexpected power – a simple story, on the face of it, but one you will find yourself musing upon days after the final page.

4 / 5 stars: Haunting.  Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

Best Friends Forever by Jennifer Weiner

Since the phrase ‘BFF’ (for ‘best friends forever’) entered the lexicon, the corresponding wave of low-brow entertainment conceits (Paris Hilton’s My New BFF a notable offender) has been trite enough to make one wish for the death of female bonding altogether, or at least for the comeback of heat-packing, no-nonsense Thelma and Louise.

Brave, then, for established novelist Jennifer Weiner to plaster an apparently vacuous title on what turns out to be a smart and funny story with some unexpected depths. Adelaide Downs and Valerie Adler first meet as nine-year-olds, when Val’s family moves into Addie’s street. They enjoy a close bond, despite their differences: Val is the pretty, popular daughter of a flighty, hand-to-mouth single mother; Addie, shy, overweight and otherwise friendless, belongs to a textbook nuclear family.

The pair part ways in vague circumstances after high school: there is an incident between Val and a popular football player of an unspecified nature, and Val moves to another part of the country, where she achieves success as a local TV weather presenter. Addie remains in her now-deceased parents’ home, caring for her disabled brother, a talented athlete who sustained permanent brain damage in a teenage joyride gone wrong, and pursuing a lucrative but solitary career creating artistic greeting cards.

All this is backstory, delicately unfurled by Weiner from the novel’s opening pages, when Val materializes on Addie’s doorstep 15 years after vanishing, wearing bloodstained clothes and asking for help. What follows (and what may owe a debt to the aforementioned BFFs of the cinema), is a fun yet moving romp in which no one really gets hurt, but several people get what’s coming to them.

Weiner’s style and subject matter conform to many of the tenets of chick-lit, from the frivolous to the grave. The novel can plausibly encompass both an hilarious scene in which an on-the-lam Val, on a years-long diet because of daily TV appearances, devours a 36-ounce steak, baked potato, creamed spinach, cheesecake and crème brulee, and a subplot, rendered with astonishing sensitivity, that explains just how Addie has found herself so alone.

Weiner recognizes the tendency in some quarters to use the ‘chick-lit’ label as a pejorative, to signify the alleged ‘less-than-literature’ status of some fiction that is about or aimed at women. She has issued strong rebuttals to those who would demean the category, telling the San Francisco Chronicle that criticism of chick-lit “is a reaction against women gaining power and economic stature in the marketplace. Book sales are flat, chick-lit sales are up. And that’s scary to a lot of people. It’s better for the establishment to slap it down, degrade it.”

Weiner’s fearlessness in commenting on the state of literature and the audacity of some critics is a quality detectable in her characters, and some of the writer’s confidence may stem from her sterling track record: a former journalist who has been publishing fiction for only nine years, she found early success with her second novel In Her Shoes, which was made into a critically-acclaimed feature film, and has since published six more top-sellers. Best Friends Forever thoroughly deserves to be another.

3 / 5 stars: Thelma and Louise Go to Florida.  Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

It’s Easier than you Think by Jo Seagar

It may be a truth universally acknowledged that one should never judge a book by its cover, but is there a corresponding axiom warning against evaluating a recipe book by the quality of its sweets? If so, I should confess that Jo Seagar’s no-nonsense new cookbook It’s Easier than you Think went straight to my sweet tooth with a recipe so audaciously saccharine as to make the hardiest pancreas tremble.

Seagar’s caramel oat slice, a heavyweight of the baking chapter, calls for a half-kilogram of butter, in addition to two cups of brown sugar, 800 grams of sweetened condensed milk, a substantial whack of golden syrup and a half-cup of chocolate (white and dark). (Mercifully, she notes that it is for “special occasions only.”)

Elsewhere, in the desserts section amid the usual comfort foods – a strawberry citrus cheesecake, microwave chocolate pudding, oaty crumble with rhubarb and berries – lurk banoffee creams, requiring gingernut biscuits, cream, more sweetened condensed milk (caramel, this time) and a crumbled Flake bar. In accordance with Seagar’s devotion to simplicity, the instructions suggest both treats would be a cinch to make.

But whether your tastes lean to the sweet or the savoury, here Seagar solidifies her reputation for producing solid Kiwi tucker with a minimum of fuss. Old-fashioned and homely yet up-to-date food is what she does, and she duly ensures It’s Easier than you Think panders neither to the trendy nor the overly traditional.

Dinner recipes are inspired by traditional stick-to the ribs fare (steaks with shallot and red wine sauce, maple-glazed meatloaf), the flavours of Asia (hoisin ginger lamb cutlets, coconut prawn laksa), and guaranteed crowd-pleasers (crumbed fish fingers, three-cheese macaroni).

The classics feature prominently, some updated – the pav is in rolled form, with lemon curd added to the cream, and the coconut ice is gluten-free – and all creations are captured with mouthwatering precision by photographer Jae Frew. The whimsical design, an all-important feature of cookbooks, dovetails with Seagar’s appreciation of the traditional – one double-page spread reproduces Creamoata and Corn-Vita packaging.

With the title, Seagar channels American celebrity chef Ina Garten, the ‘Barefoot Contessa’ and top-rating host of various programmes on the Food Network whose signature phrase is, “How easy is that?” Ease is the dominant message and purpose of this cookbook, the second collection of recipes from Seagar’s eponymous Cook School in Oxford, North Canterbury, where Seagar and her husband run Seagars, which encompasses the school, a café and a kitchen shop.

It’s not a book that poses special challenges – for serious restaurant food, you are much better to consult the first Masterchef New Zealand cookbook or Simon Wright’s glorious volume The French Café. Rather, It’s Easier than you Think is designed for hard use, with weighty stock suitable for cooking spatters and general wear-and-tear, and compiled with an evident understanding of its potential readership – the weary parent of picky eaters, the learner baker, the host of a family gathering.

Anyone who has ever watched Seagar deftly whip up a batch of scrumptious tidbits will be familiar with her ‘simple and delicious’ mantra. It’s Easier than you Think delivers on the promise of its title.

3 / 5 stars: Tucker to please the pickiest of eaters.  Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.