POP CULTURE BOOKS
The Insatiables by Brittany Terwilliger (Amberjack Publishing, 338 pages) Live Entertain every Fridment & Saturd ay ay
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RASHEEDA HASAN BOOK COLLECTION Rasheeda’s Family Table:
This book began with the idea of just offering recipes for Indian cuisine, but over time it evolved into a wider selection of recipes, including most popular Western, African, Chinese, Korean, and Middle Eastern dishes. These recipes are easy, delicious, and meant to be fun and inspirational.
Understanding Baking:
This book convinces home bakers that baking is simpler than its reputation. Thorough understanding of basic techniques not only makes it easy to bake with confidence, but also gives you a vision to create your own versions.
In her books Rasheeda Hasan tries to teach discipline to home cooks for culinary success. Her advice is: Read the recipe thoroughly and ahead of time to have everything in place like French Mise En Place. Cooking techniques are the key to cooking with confidence, and will change a chore to a passion. Understanding Baking is an effort to transform fear of baking into fun. Baker is made aware of the importance of correct ingredients, measuring. Mixing, times and temperatures in baking. This knowledge can give you the power and confidence to offer your family global food in your own home and delight the palate of family members and friends alike.
For more information or to order visit www.jrhasan.com HIPPO | NOVEMBER 15 - 21, 2018 | PAGE 44
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If there ever were a perfect time to lament the futility of advancing from support-level jobs, now is the time to publish that story. Middle-class millennials were told that going to fouryear colleges would secure them steady careers, but as the decades have worn on, all it has guaranteed is tens of thousands of dollars of debt that is getting increasingly difficult to pay off. Brittany Terwilliger’s The Insatiables may have been written as a satire about corporations, but its perspective of an entrylevel protagonist feels startlingly true to life. Halley Faust wants a life that expands outside of her Dayton, Ohio, upbringing, a desire her family tries to chastise her out of wanting. She has a job; why doesn’t she want to settle down like her sister? Why does she think she’s better than her relatives who came before her? It does not take an English major to figure out that Halley’s pursuit of a promotion is no better than a deal with the devil. The story begins with Halley and her best friend Celeste in the trenches of office politics. This is best summed up with the catch-22, “As Service Staff, you were supposed to keep events like this running smoothly. But you had no authority to do it.” Terwilliger spins comical details that will feel familiar to anyone who has ever worked in a cubicle. There are bosses sulking over everything from coffee machines to grand entrances on hang gliders. There are petty squabbles about choice assignments and getting recognized for hours spent on menial tasks. There are rumors about the special accommodations made for certain higher-ups during company conferences. Terwilliger will make readers want to laugh to keep from crying, or at least turn to someone and say, “Can you believe this guy?” But the good will and camaraderie between Halley and Celeste are quickly set aside when their boss announces that they
Books Author Events • DAN SZCZESNY Author presents The White Mountain: Rediscovering Mount Washington’s Hidden Culture. Thurs., Nov. 15, 7 p.m. Nashua Public Library, 2 Court St., Nashua. Visit danszczesny.wordpress.com. • TIM CAVERLY Author and humorist visits. Sun., Nov. 18,
will be competing for the same promotion (and subsequent relocation to Paris). Before she even realizes she’s doing it, Halley betrays Celeste, altering the course of both of their lives forever. Though Halley receives the promotion that she had never thought possible, she finds that her work in France is just as frustrating. Readers will feel the impossibility of Halley’s task as she tries to help launch a product appropriately called the Tantalus. The completion of this project feels continuously out of reach as the rest of her team is seduced by the French countryside and fails to complete its share of the work. Suddenly, everything Halley has ever wanted is no longer enough. She wants to get promoted again. She wants to be with a man who is not only one of her company’s most important clients, but married. As a middle-class white woman, she thinks her American dream is yet again just out of her grasp, but what she considers as “settling” (steady income and a supportive family back in Ohio) would be dream enough for anyone in less fortunate circumstances. How could someone who is lucky enough to be paid to live abroad lament their lot in life? Though Terwilliger’s plots of backstabbing corporate ladder-climbing and infidelity are a bit predictable, there’s something satisfying about a plot that ties together in a neat bow at the end. Because Halley is power-hungry in her work and her relationships, she has to decide where she draws the line of how far she is willing to bend her moral compass. The Insatiables falls down the well-worn path of “absolute power corrupts absolutely,” but there’s a reason that readers return to this storyline again and again. Readers don’t want to believe that they will betray their oldest friends to get a leg up in the rat race. Readers want to see that a protagonist will do the morally right thing before the corruption gets too far. Readers want to believe that they will know when they are content with what they have. B — Katherine Ouellette
2 p.m. Tucker Free Library, 31 Western Ave., Henniker. Visit tuckerfreelibrary.org. • MARY ANN ESPOSITO Author presents Ciao Italia: My Lifelong Food Adventures in Italy. Sun., Nov. 18, 4 to 5 p.m. The Amato Center for Performing Arts, 56 Mont Vernon St., Milford. Visit toadbooks.com. • JAN BRETT Author presents
The Snowy Nap. Fri., Nov. 23, 5 p.m. Gibson’s Bookstore , 45 S. Main St , Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com. • WENDY WALTER Author presents Being Pickity. Sat., Nov. 24, noon. Toadstool Bookstore, 614 Nashua St., Milford. Visit toadbooks.com. • MARY ANN ESPOSITO Author presents Ciao Italia: