Books by Michelle Wildgen

I read three of Ms. Wildgen's books. The first one I picked off the New Books shelf and after reading it, went to the stacks for more by this author.

Bread and Butter (the first novel I read by this author but the third one she has written):
Two brothers, Leo and Britt, own and operate a successful upscale restaurant in a small town an hour from Pittsburgh. Then, Harry, a third and much younger brother returns to town and decides that he is going to open a restaurant also, which is surprising but also disconcerting. So there are the family dynamics and lots of writing that foodies would like:

 "Harry reached into the lowboy for a little oval stoneware dish filled with baccala; it would go into the oven to heat and finish with a run under the salamander to born it before it was plated with the socca and lightly dressed arugula."

"The sardines lay denuded and separated from their nduja-spread toasts, a flavor combination Britt now confirmed was not working, since no one was eating it together. The cloudy-eye heads of the fish were stoically averted from the bare fronds of their ribs. The baby octopus wasn't moving, but the few he'd seen looked perfect, purple and white beneath a yellow haystack of frizzed ginger."

"As he passed his parents, he let a hand linger briefly on their shoulders while he peered at their plates. They were down to crumbs, but that didn't mean they'd loved the dishes. Harry and Britt could have set a live possum before their parents and their mother would have coolly, maternally, sharpened her butter knife."

Good characters, scenes and plot development.

You're Not You (Ms Wilden's debut novel):
I also liked this even though it was more somber than Bread and Butter. Kate is a wealthy, attractive, relatively young, married woman with Lou Gehrig's disease and she needs a caregiver. Becca is a college student with no experience doing this kind of work, but she applies for the position anyway and is hired.

I found it a powerful book as Becca's carefree college life is juxtaposed with Kate's who is wheelchair-bound and has minimal motor function left. It's not sappy at all and Becca is not a saint.

"After a moment she let her eyes close again, but they opened in surprise as her head fell forward, her chin dropping coward her chest. This had been happening more lately. The next step was a new head-rest on her wheelchair, more of a brace, to grip her skull and hold her up. I reached over as I  drove, my palm and fingertips flat against her forehead as I tipped her head back again. She felt warm, her smooth skin leaving a faint trace of powdered slickness from her makeup on my hand."

Kate has a kind attentive husband but one day, she tells Becca that Evan is moving out, and Becca starts to spend more and more time with Kate, becoming tangled up in something bigger than herself. She learns to cook with Kate's coaching. She gets to know the other caregivers. She continues her love affair with a married professor. It's a complete novel, satisfying all the way through.

This book was the best, although Bread and Butter was easier as eating is better than dying.

But Not For Long
There are housing coops in a college town in Wisconsin. Hal, Greta and Karin live in one of them and are the characters in this book, but I couldn't figure out the point of the novel. Who was the person on the dock? Why did the power go off? Who were these self-absorbed, vaguely hippie-ish characters and what was their future? What was the cheese-cured-in-caves all about? And Will….why was he in this story only near the end? It seemed like ideas for several different novels were all being tried out in this one…and then it just ended.

Still, two out of three isn't bad...