Introduction

"An impressive and heartfelt debut that will appeal to many readers, this charming and sensitive mother/daughter story captures the struggle between protection and isolation."?Library Journal

Meg May's mother has created a life out of stories. Outlandish stories that can't possibly be true. And when sickness threatens to hide the truth of her past forever, Meg must convince her imaginative and free-spirited mother tell her what is real.
As charming as the stories she's been told are, they aren't enough for Meg anymore. As she and her mother spend one last summer together, Meg tries to convince her mother to reveal a thing about who they used to be?and who they are now.

Full of quirky humor and depth of feeling, From the Kitchen of Half Truth is a delicious debut contemporary novel. Fans of Chocolat (Joanne Harris), The School of Essential Ingredients (Erica Bauermeister), and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (Aimee Bender) will be charmed by this unobtrusive look at mother daughter relationships and the powerful exploration of the stories we tell ourselves to create the lives we want.

Full of quirky humor and depth of feeling, From the Kitchen of Half Truth is a delicious debut contemporary novel.

What reviewers are saying about The Kitchen of Half Truth

"[A] touching debut novel about the relationship between a mother and daughter" ?Publishers Weekly

"There are some novels that grip you with a story so unique, yet so heart wrenching that you can't stop reading. From the Kitchen of Half Truth was just such a novel."?Laura's Reviews

"Held me captivated from first to last word ... You'll find just a little piece of yourself in all the wonderful characters."?Long and Short Reviews

" Funny, tender, quirky, and heartfelt, From the Kitchen of Half Truth is for anyone who has daydreamed about the future or been shocked to find something unexpected in the past."?Booklist

"A gorgeous tale of love, loss and making sense of the past ... filled with energy and life."?RT Book Reviews

"A story about understanding and compassion and how people often distort the truth to protect themselves and others, Goodin's narrative contains moments of eloquence, wit and sensitivity."?Kirkus

Editorial Review

No editorial review at this time.

Excerpt

chapter one

I came out a little underdone. Five more minutes and I would have been as big as the other children, my mother said. She blamed my pale complexion on her cravings for white bread (too much flour) and asked the doctor if I would have risen better had she done more exercise (too little air). The doctor wasn't sure about this, but he was very concerned about the size of my feet. He suggested that next time my mother was pregnant she should try standing on her head or spinning in circles (spinning in circles on her head would be ideal), as this would aid the mixing process and result in a better-proportioned baby.

My father was a French pastry chef with nimble fingers and a gentle touch. On my mother's sixteenth birthday he led her to a cherry orchard and fed her warm custard tart under a moonlit sky. She knew it would never last, that his passion for shortcrust would always be greater than his passion for her, but she was intoxicated by his honey skin and cinnamon kisses. When they made love, the Earth shook, and ripe cherries fell to the orchard floor. My father gathered the fallen cherries in a blanket and promised my mother that upon his return to Paris he would create a cherry pastry and name it after her, but he never had the chance. Four days after his return to France he was killed in a tragic pastry-mixing accident. The only part of him still visible above the dough was his right hand, in which he clutched a single plump, red cherry. Finding herself alone with a bun in the oven and no instructions, my mother set the timer on top of her parents' fridge to nine months and waited patiently for it to ping.

Throughout her pregnancy, my mother suffered all manner of complications. She was overcome by hot flashes several times a day, which the midwife blamed on a faulty thermostat, and she experienced such bad gas that a man from the local gas board had to come and give her a ten-point safety check. Her fingers swelled up like sausages so that every time she walked down the street, the local dogs would chase her, snapping at her hands. She consumed a copious amount of eggs, not because she craved them, but because she was convinced the glaze would give me a nice golden glow. Instead, when the midwife slapped me on the back, I clucked like a chicken.

***

I want you to understand that these are all my mother's words, not mine. I myself am mentally stable and under no illusion that any of this ever actually happened. I have no idea what did happen during the first five years of my life, because for some reason I can't recall a thing. Not a birthday party, not a Christmas, not a trip to the seaside...not a thing. I don't remember my first bedroom, the toys I played with, the games I liked. Perhaps people don't remember much from those first five years, but I'm convinced I should remember something. Anything. Instead, all I have to go on are my mother's memories, which, in fact, are not memories at all but ridiculous fantasies that reflect her obsession with food and cooking and deny me any insight into my early years.

Am I annoyed with her? Of course I am! I want to know how I started out in this world, who my father was, what I was like as a baby, normal things like that. But however much I ask, I always get the same old stories: the spaghetti plant that sprouted in our window box on my first birthday, the Christmas turkey that sprang to life and released itself from the oven when I was two, the horseradish sauce that neighed unexpectedly...I mean, what is all this rubbish? I'm twenty-one years old, and yet my crazy mother still insists on telling me idiotic stories like I'm a baby. She's told these stories so many times that she actually believes them. The story of her pregnancy is ridiculous enough, but you should hear the story of my birth.

***

It was the gasman's fault I came out underdone. He'd come to deliver my mother's ten-point safety certificate in person after taking a bit of a shine to her, and my mother had felt obliged to offer him a slice of her freshly baked date-and-almond cake. They were having tea in my grandparents' kitchen when, all of a sudden, the gasman started choking. My grandfather, a member of the St. John's ambulance service, jumped up and grabbed the gasman around the waist and, with a sharp squeeze, freed the offending morsel of cake, which flew across the room, knocking the timer off the fridge. At the sound of the ping, I thought my time was up and started to push my way into the world.

Between them, my grandparents and the gasman carried my mother upstairs and laid her on my grandparents' bed.

"The baby can't come out yet!" my mother kept shouting. "It won't be properly done!"

But done or not, I was coming out, and so efforts began to make the labor as short and painless as possible.

"Go and get some butter, Brenda!" shouted my grandfather to my grandmother, mopping his brow with his handkerchief. "If she eats a pack of butter, the baby should slide out."

But a pack of butter did no good other than to turn my mother's skin yellow, so my grandmother suggested garlic.

"The baby won't like it if you eat garlic. He'll want to come out for air."

Consuming an entire bulb of garlic didn't force me out either, so my mother shouted, "Get some of that cake up here! We'll lure the baby out with the delicious smell."

And so half a freshly baked date-and-almond cake was held between my mother's thighs, and, lo and behold, I started to move.

"It's coming fast!" screamed my mother.

"Quickly, Brenda, get something to catch it in!" cried my grandfather.

In the end, it was the gasman who caught me in a heavy-based frying pan. By the time the midwife arrived, it was all over, although she insisted on poking me gently with a fork and plonking me onto the kitchen scales. She sniffed me and confirmed I was under-ripe, but as soon as she put me on the windowsill, my mother took me down again.

"She's my baby, and she'll ripen when she wants!" snapped my mother. Holding me close to her chest, she kissed the top of my head and proclaimed I tasted like nutmeg.

And so that's what I was called.

Meg.

***

I'm traveling home for the weekend, if you can call it home. When my grandfather died three years ago, my mother moved into the little cottage in Cambridgeshire where she grew up, the one where I was supposedly born, although I don't even know if that's true. The cottage suits her perfectly. Although it's not big, it has a long, narrow garden where my mother can indulge her love of growing fruits and vegetables. She grows potatoes and cabbages, spinach, peas, radishes, tomatoes, lettuce...and then there's all the fruit. Apart from having a small apple orchard at the far side of the garden, she also grows strawberries, plums, gooseberries, raspberries...the list is really quite endless. She spends her time gathering and cooking all these ingredients, boiling things up in big metal saucepans, frying, stewing, roasting, baking, simmering, steaming. She makes stews, pies, tarts, casseroles, cakes, soups, sauces, sorbets-you name it, she makes it. I have absolutely no idea what she does with all this food, and whenever I ask her, she's very elusive. It's my suspicion that a lot of it must get thrown away. The real enjoyment is in the cooking process itself, and what happens to the food after that is seemingly inconsequential to her. She's a flamboyant, reckless cook, throwing things around, chucking bits here and there, and leaving destruction in her wake. By the end of the day, the kitchen looks like a bomb's exploded, but I'm used to it.

My mother raised me among culinary chaos in a small North London flat. Because the ventilation was poor and my mother was constantly cooking, we survived in a haze of steam, which once got so dense that my mother lost me for forty-eight hours. She finally tracked me down in the living room with the aid of a special fog lamp. Apparently.

Because we had no TV or radio, the soundtrack to my childhood was compiled of saucepan lids banging, knives chopping, mixers whirring, and liquids bubbling. I went to school with clothes that smelled of spice and a lunchbox packed with elaborate sandwiches and homemade delicacies. The other kids thought we must be posh, but, in fact, we survived on a meager income. My mother was never too proud to take the squishy fruit or bruised vegetables that were left at the end of market day. Nothing made her happier than baking.

Nothing other than me, that is.

***

"Twelve minutes late," sighs Mark, staring up at the departures board. "Forty-six pounds for a train ticket, and the bloody thing's twelve minutes late. It's ridiculous. Do you realize you're spending approximately twenty-one pence for each minute you will sit on that train? That means that, in theory, they owe you two pounds and fifty-two pence for the twelve minutes you've wasted sitting on this platform. Oh, thirteen minutes now. So that makes it-"

"Mark," I interrupt, taking his hand, "you really don't have to wait with me."

He puts his arms around me and pulls me close to his chest. "I want to wait with you, babe," he says, smiling, showing off his beautifully straight, white teeth.

I take in the sharp angle of his cheekbones, the perfect line of his nose, the subtle arch of his brows. He is wonderfully symmetrical. Classically handsome. Like a child fascinated by an attractive object, I can't stop myself from reaching out and tracing the contours of his clean-shaven jawline with my fingers. His clear blue eyes sparkle with intelligence and betray a wealth of knowledge. He is always questioning, learning, rationalizing, and this thirst for knowledge, along with his heightened sense of practicality, makes me weak at the knees. When I first listened to him speak about condensed-matter physics, I knew I was in love; here was a man who, above all else, craved the same thing I did: hard, cold facts.

Mark brushes a piece of hair away from my face. "I've never noticed that lit... view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. The original title of this book was Nutmeg. Do you think From the Kitchen of Half Truth is more appropriate? Why or why not? 2. Do you agree with Meg’s following statement to Mark: “I’d rather have fictional memories than no memories at all.” 3. Was there any foreshadowing that the fanciful stories hid a darker reality? If yes, what was it, and when did you see it? 4. Meg’s nightmare about the White Giant is recurring and seems to intensify as she gets closer to the truth. Did you have any theories about this nightmare? Did they turn out to be true? 5. After discovering the truth about Meg’s father, do you think Valerie’s decision to make up stories was justified? Or do you think they did more harm than good? 6. Meg and her mother are very different, but they do have several similarities. What are they, and when do they emerge?

Weblinks

»	Maria Goodin's Website
»	Publisher's Book Info

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