The recipe for Pizza Della Romana, or Pizza by the Meter (nice pun there that only becomes obvious in the following chapters) instructs her to light a candle, say some incantations and verses of gratitude to the Goddess Demeter, and leave an offering of dough sprinkled with wine, which Lina chooses to place outside at the base of a tree in her courtyard. Gotta love a woman who keeps good wine in her home. Part recipe guide and part spellbook, the cookbook offers several options for Lina's luncheon menu, and she decides to try out a recipe at home, since, as a proper Italian woman, she's got plenty of the core ingredients in her home, including good wine. Facing a great blow to her ego and her bank account, she goes searching for food items to use in an expanded luncheon menu to try to earn back the money she needs and finds an old cookbook in a used book store: The Italian Goddess Cookbook. She's the sole proprietor of a successful bakery using her grandmother's Italian recipes, and is doing marvelously well until her accountant gives her horrid advice that leaves her deep in debt to the IRS. She's quite an atypical heroine, in that she is older (y'all, she's 43!) and she's survived the end of a marriage that left her caught between a lack of confidence - her husband left her for a younger, more fertile woman - and a regrowth of her own capabilities.
Lina, or Carolina, is the owner of Pani del Goddess, a Tulsa-based bakery. Cast's Goddess series, between Goddess of the Sea, and Goddess of Light, and retells a myth you are likely familiar with, illuminating it in a manner that not only subverts the original meaning but recasts a lot of standard Greek mythology into femno-centric themes. Candy and I work so hard to keep this a fair, balanced, and damn snarky site and I might as well hork up a fluffy bunny for this review because my gosh, I loved this book. This might be the hardest review I wrote because I want to squee all over the place about all the factors I liked. But I think it was the writing- I cried at the end. Could be hormones, could be that I was really tired and already emotional. Let me get the climax out of the way first – not very satisfying, but really, I can't amble around verbally until I get to the good part.
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