World of Pies by Karen Stolz Review
Hyperion, May 2000.Hardcover, 160 pages.
ISBN: 0786865504.
World of Pies is a beautiful and comforting book about growing up in a small town in Texas, and it is a delight to read on several levels. For those who enjoy the feel of holding a good book, World of Pies will not disappoint. Printed in an easy to read medium blue and fringed with lovely deckled edges, this book is of a size that easily fits into a book bag. And just so that the reader can truly experience the feeling of life lived in a small town, the recipes mentioned in the story are printed at the end of each chapter. There is nothing low fat or sugar free here though, and the reader can return to simpler days when everyone walked everywhere and ate what was provided.
Books about growing up and the lessons
learned along the way have always been an endearing and instructive
form of literature. Now Karen Stolz has presented us
with a thorough understanding of what it is like to grow up
in a small Texas town in the late fifties and sixties. At first,
the reader will feel that reading this book is a great deal like
reading a small town paper that tries to put down the local
news in an interesting -- but not too alarming -- way. The tone also
is reminiscent of those dormitory room bull sessions when college students
would cautiously at first, then more bravely, share their most intimate
stories about friends and family. Stolz introduces a cast of characters which,
by the end of the book, seem like old friends.
In our contemporary world, where dysfunctional characters
abound and new horrors almost fail to shock us, the story
of Roxanne's life seems somehow reassuring. The story begins
with a hot summer, a pie baking
contest and playing baseball, and ends with a conversation
with her own daughter about baking a perfect pie.
All of the characters in Roxanne's story meet the same life challenges
that require creative thinking and hard work to find solutions: these
same challenges that the more
dysfunctional people in many modern novels find so insurmountable.
A father drops
dead on Thanksgiving, the letters that a favorite aunt who never
married had saved from a lesbian mistress, the young man who
returned from Viet Nam injured in both body and mind, and
the other little stories about real people all not different or new.
What is different is how good people full of
love for each other overcome these vicissitudes with grace,
humor and affection. World of Pies is a wise and refreshing
look at life that leaves the reader with a feeling of optimism.
It also leaves the reader with some very tempting recipes for
the foods that carried these good, strong people through life's trials .
Ordering information: Amazon.com.
Return to the September 2000 issue of The IWJ.