Atlantic Ave Magazine December 2022

otta Read
entertainment | GOTTA read By lisa marie
Screaming on the
Inside
by Jessica Grose
In this timely and necessary book, New York
Times opinion writer Jessica Grose dismantles
two hundred years of unrealistic parenting expectations
and empowers today’s mothers to make
choices that serve themselves, their children, and
their communities.
Close your eyes and picture the perfect mother.
She is usually blonde and thin. Her roots never
show, and she installed that gleaming kitchen
backsplash herself (watch her TikTok for DIY
tips). She seamlessly melds work, wellness, and
home; during the pandemic, she also ran a remote
school and woke up at 5am to meditate.
You may read this and think it’s bananas; you
have probably internalized much of it.
Journalist Jessica Grose sure had. After failing
to meet every one of her expectations for her first
pregnancy, she devoted her career to revealing
how morally bankrupt so many of these ideas and
pressures are. Now, in Screaming on the Inside,
Grose weaves her personal journey with scientific,
historical, and contemporary reporting to be
the voice for American parents she wishes she’d
had a decade ago.
The truth is that parenting cannot follow a recipe;
there are no specific rules that will result in
a perfectly adjusted child. Every parent has different
values, and we will have other ideas about how
to pass those values along to our children. What
successful parenting has in common, regardless
of culture or community, is close observation of
the kind of unique humans our children are. In
thoughtful and revelatory chapters about pregnancy,
identity, work, social media, and the crisis
of the Covid-19 pandemic, Grose explains how
we got to this moment, why the current state of
expectations on mothers is wholly unsustainable,
and how we can move towards something better.
Lessons in Chemistry
by Bonnie Garmus
Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average
woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the
first to point out that there is no such thing as
an average woman. But it’s the early 1960s, and
her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute
takes a very unscientific view of equality. Except
for one: Calvin Evans, the lonely, brilliant, Nobel–
prize-nominated grudge-holder who falls in love
with—of all things—her mind. True chemistry
results.
54 | December 2022 | www.AtlanticAveMagazine.com
But, like science, life is unpredictable. This is
why a few years later, Elizabeth Zott finds herself
not only a single mother but the reluctant star
of America’s most beloved cooking show, Supper
at Six. Elizabeth’s unusual approach to cooking
(“combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a
pinch of sodium chloride”) proves revolutionary.
But as her following grows, not everyone is
happy. Because as it turns out, Elizabeth Zott isn’t
just teaching women to cook. She’s daring them to
change the status quo.
Laugh-out-loud funny, shrewdly observant,
and studded with a dazzling cast of supporting
characters, Lessons in Chemistry is as original and
vibrant as its protagonist.
The Ingenue
by Rachel Kapelke-DALe
My Dark Vanessa meets The Queen’s Gambit in
this new novel of suspense about the bonds of
family, the limits of talent, the risks of ambition,
and the rewards of revenge.
When former piano prodigy Saskia Kreis returns
home to Milwaukee after her mother’s
unexpected death, she expects to inherit the Elf
House family estate. But with the discovery that
her mother’s will bequeathed the Elf House to a
man whom Saskia shares a complicated history
with, she is forced to reexamine her past––and the
romantic relationship that changed the course of
her life––for answers. Can she find a way to claim
her heritage while keeping her secrets buried or
will the fallout from digging too deep destroy her?
Set against a post #MeToo landscape, Rachel
Kapelke-Dale’s The Ingenue delves into motherdaughter
relationships, the expectations of talent,
the stories we tell ourselves, and what happens
when the things that once made you special are
taken from you. Moving between Saskia’s childhood
and the present day, this dark, contemporary
fairy tale pulses with desire, longing, and
uncertainty, as it builds to its spectacular, shocking
climax.
Your Table Is Ready:
Tales of a New York City
Maître D’
by Michael Cecchi-Azzolina
front-of-the-house Kitchen Confidential from
A a career maître d’hotel who manned the front
of the room in New York City’s hottest and most
in-demand restaurants.
From the glamorous to the entitled, from
royalty to the financially ruined, everyone who
wanted to be seen―or to gawk―at the hottest restaurants
in New York City came to places Michael
Cecchi-Azzolina helped run. His phone number
was passed around among those who wanted to
curry favor during the decades when restaurants
replaced clubs and theater as, well, theater in the
world’s most visible, vibrant city.
Besides dropping us back into a vanished time,
Your Table Is Ready takes us places we’d never be
able to get into on our own: Raoul’s in Soho with
its louche club vibe; Buzzy O’Keefe’s casually elegant
River Café (the only outer-borough establishment
desirable enough to be included in this
roster), from Keith McNally’s Minetta Tavern to
Nolita’s Le Coucou, possibly the most beautiful
room in New York City in 2018, with its French
Country Auberge-meets-winery look and the
most exquisite and enormous stands of flowers,
COPYRIGHTED
changed every three days.
From his early career serving theater stars
like Tennessee Williams and Dustin Hoffman at
La Rousse right through to the last pre-pandemic
shutdown full houses at Le Coucou, Cecchi-Azzolina
has seen it all. In Your Table Is Ready, he breaks
down how restaurants really run (and don’t) and
how the economics work for owners and overworked
staff alike. The professionals who gravitate
to the business are a unique, stricter breed,
practiced in dealing with the demanding patrons
and each other in a distinctive ecosystem that’s
somewhere between a George Orwell “down and
out in…” dungeon and a sleek showman’s smokeand-mirrors
palace.