New Release: What Kings Ate and Wizards Drank by Krista D. Ball

New this week on Kindle, and coming soon to Kobo and other formats, including paperback - What Kings Ate and Wizards Drank, a Fantasy Lover's Food Guide.

Equal parts writer’s guide, comedy, and historical cookbook, fantasy author Krista D. Ball takes readers on a journey into the depths of epic fantasy’s obsession with rabbit stew and teaches them how to catch the blasted creatures, how to move armies across enemy territories without anyone starving to death, and what a medieval pantry should look like when your heroine is seducing the hero.

Learn how long to cook a salted cow tongue, how best to serve salt fish, what a “brewis” is (hint: it isn’t beer), how an airship captain would make breakfast, how to preserve just about anything, and why those dairy maids all have ample hips.

What Kings Ate will give writers of historical and fantastical genres the tools to create new conflicts in their stories, as well as add authenticity to their worlds, all the while giving food history lovers a taste of the past with original recipes and historical notes.
 

A little taste:

Pound Cake

In the 16th century, for example, all cakes were made with yeast. However, the Germans and British eventually moved to using eggs to raise their cakes. In Jane Austen’s time, cakes were going through that transition, where recipe books like Rundell’s A New System of Domestic Cookery were giving recipes for both kinds of cakes. By the time Mrs. Beeton put out her books in the Victorian era, most cakes were being made with eggs, and only poor people were using yeast to raise their cakes.

Today, pound cake is a yellow cake, browned on the outside. It’s often given terms like “light” and “moist.” While this cake is moist, I’m not sure the term “light” can ever be applied to this one.

Ingredients:

• 1 lb butter
• 1 lb sugar
• 8 eggs
• 1 lb flour
• 1 tsp each nutmeg and cinnamon
• ½ tsp ground cloves
• 2 tbsp caraway seeds
• 6oz wine

Instructions:

1. Beat a pound of butter into a cream. 
2. Separate the yolk and whites from the eggs and beat each in separate bowls. 
3. Combine all of the dry ingredients. 
4. Mix the wet and dry ingredients. Your hero’s love interest will need to hand-beat this for a full hour, so he better appreciate it when she (or he) gives it to him! (Modern chefs can use a hand mixer for 7-8 minutes.) 
5. Butter a baking pan and bake it for one hour in a “quick” oven (375 degrees F).

Find it on Amazon now!

Krista was born and raised in Deer Lake, Newfoundland, where she learned how to use a chainsaw, chop wood,and make raspberry jam. After obtaining a B.A. in British History from Mount Allison University, Krista moved to Edmonton, AB where she currently lives. Somehow, she’s picked up an engineer, two kids, six cats, and a very understanding corgi off ebay. Her credit card has been since taken away. Like any good writer, Krista has had an eclectic array of jobs throughout her life, including strawberry picker, pub bathroom cleaner, oil spill cleaner upper and soup-kitchen coordinator. You can find her causing trouble at http://kristadball.com

Promo: Not My Mother by Ashley Rae

Not My Mother: A Memoir

Genre: Memoir/Non-Fiction

Release Date: July 13, 2012

 
By the age of twelve, Ashley Rae had survived incest, child abuse, and the deaths of both her biological parents. Born to Baptists but raised by Buddhists, Rae found peace and healing on a Pagan spiritual path while obtaining her college degree and starting the career of her dreams.

Rae thought the hardships in her life were over...until she lost her job, started a new relationship, and found out she was pregnant with another man's child all in the same week. Terrified of cesarean surgery, Rae vowed to give birth to her child at home – but first, she had to find one.

Alternately haunting, humorous, and heart-warming, Not My Mother: A Memoir follows Rae over a nine-month quest to break her family's generational pattern of abuse and victimhood in order to become for her unborn child the mother she had always wanted for herself.

Excerpt:

From the moment Dad rushed us through the dark living room, too quickly for me to see her body, I'd been looking for my mother.  Even after her funeral in Virginia, I kept looking for my mother.  She came to me in my dreams and told me it had all been a mistake, and she wasn't really dead at all.  I'd wake up and jump out of bed in a hurry to continue our conversation, then freeze and fold in half, hyperventilating as reality hit me.

At twenty-two, I had not yet explored how the violence that I couldn't remember witnessing affected my life and my relationships.  Ike died when I was five.  Mom hated him.  His mom loved him.  I, on the other hand, had never given myself permission to have feelings about this man who'd loved me and killed my mother. Until I saw him staring back at me through my mirror in the flickering light of a white candle.

Buy Links:

Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Smashwords

Ashley Rae has a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Central Florida and resides with her precious 3 year old in gorgeous Sarasota, FL.  She leads weekend retreats for psychics, kids, and writers, and teaches workshops on using writing as a self-healing tool, developing intuition, and about The Incredible Vagina, which is simply the best title anyone has ever come up with for any class, ever. She is presently working on her second memoir, tentatively titled “Sentence Interrupted: Memoir of a Moody Mama.” Also a professional psychic, energy healer, and a Love-Your-Life Coach, there is plenty to check out on her website at http://AuthorAshleyRae.com.

Review: Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin

Black Like Me: Updated by John Howard Griffin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In all honesty, I must admit I have no idea how to rate this book. Given GR's star system, it's confusing to me. It really is sort of "amazing" in terms of its undertaking, compelling material and its impact. Yet, I'm not sure I can give it a full 5, despite its status as a classic. I loved this book in high school, and back then I would have rated it 5 stars without question. Now, as an adult, I hesitate. I will try to explain.

Black Like Me has a couple different aspects, each with different levels of usefulness.

As an early "non-fiction novel" it does ride up there with In Cold Blood. As a story, I found it hard to put down, and I found it quite gripping. Griffin's prose is charismatic and well constructed, and the "story" has a nice progression and flow due to the travel element, from New Orleans to the "heart of segregation," and it's hard not to hold your breath through his travels Southward. I also found his personal reflections fascinating, as his introspection developed.

As "ethnography," I do feel this book has great importance. Griffin records a lot of voices he would not have been able to capture had be not blackened his face, and his vignettes tell the reader a lot about the nature of segregation. While I feel he pulls some editorial punches (for example, I feel he shys away from recording dialects and other details that might have been valuable left intact), and I know he has shaped the material with a particular theme in mind, I also think it's a valuable read for anyone studying this period, or race relations in general. Griffin, from all accounts, seems to have led a remarkable life, and this period is one of its major highlights.

As social justice philosophy, it's of course admirable in its goals. It does demonstrate that skin colour overrode (overrides?) all, since he changed neither his name nor his credentials as he traveled. He was, as he says, the same man, but for colour, and he succeeds in describing the many, many adjustments he was forced to make because of his darker skin.

However, in this area it has dated a bit, in my opinion. Looking at it from 2012, it's hard to embrace the "black face" of it (though Griffin is clear that he never lied to people about being a black man; he just darkened himself and let people decide what they would), but it isn't just the performance of dark skin that makes me uneasy. It's actually the number of times that Griffin uses the term (or concept) of "we" to describe his experience within the black community, and how often he refers to himself as "black" that makes me uneasy. In a way it fits, because he was living under the restrictions, but I wonder at the "right" of this.

But, he spent eight weeks. Eight weeks, out of (at that point) 40-odd years. While the place of pigment can't be discounted, it's difficult to agree that he had become a black man over eight weeks of sharing these restrictions. Always, he knew he could take it off, and return to his "real life". I can't help but think that pretending simply can't reproduce the feeling of permanence. Darkening one's skin can't really compare with living in that skin, and likely feeling (in the 50s) the sense of no escape, ever, from segregation. So, to me, these assertions rather over-stepped into appropriation. I believe Griffin's heart was in the right place, but I do think this is over reaching the limits of his experiment.

As Malcolm X noted about this book, "Can you imagine how much more horrifying it would be to live like this your whole life?"

For this, I pull back a bit from five stars, because over-stressing this book has its dangers, in my opinion, and buying Griffin as an "insider" just doesn't fly. He certainly had a better understanding than people who hadn't walked a mile in those shoes, but he wasn't really an "insider," either, because he knew it was an experiment.

He works much better as a "participant observer," perhaps, although his own emotional "insiderness" was compelling in its own right when it was appropriate. (Of particular relevance were the moments of revelation he had looking at himself in a mirror, and facing his own racism and feelings of complete alienation from the black face that looked back at him.) His space on the margins of the white community in the face of his beliefs and his findings were especially interesting to me.

Griffin's description of the book's reception by the write community is dreadful (literally, filled with dread). The last section of the book feels a bit disjointed and tacked on, which is a pity, but I think it's part of the book's power. (There were a few moments where it went into martyr-mode, but overall he kept it pretty concise and journalistic, and held back from too much self-congratulation.)

Black Like Me, as some critics have said, is a great book on racism - for white people. It is in the book's portrayal of the whites along the way, and the reactions it spurred, that ring the best for me.

The edition I read had an afterword from after 1967, which made an interesting epilogue. By this point, Griffin was noticing that his position as "spokesman" was wearing thin, and it seems he wanted to (and had been asked to, perhaps) step back. He found he was being asked to consult on the "race problem" with white committees who didn't even think to invite black leaders! He was becoming, for white leaders, a safe or more palatable substitute, and that simply didn't work. As he expressed in an interview elsewhere, it had become ridiculous for him to serve as a voice for the black community, when it had many, better voices of its own. For me, this realization went a long way to addressing my concerns in the book itself.

So, final reckoning...? Certainly worth the read, as history and as a work of prose. I would recommend anyone interested in this period or these issues read this, particularly the updated edition. If you want to know more about Jim Crow laws and practices in everyday life, this book could be valuable to you. But, like with most serious issues, I caution that this shouldn't be the only book you read about it. This is not the final word, and I don't believe Griffin meant it to be. But it might make an excellent starting point, and is a good narrative illustration among the numerous academic books on the subject.

View all my reviews