Cooking for Her Eyes: Transcription of a Sonata

Cooking for Her Eyes tells the story of Susan's life journey. She takes us through her various stages of life where we come to know her Japanese-American family and the mother who cares for them all. She teaches Susan to cook and it is a passion they share for years to come. We follow Susan as she pursues a career in architecture, not common for a woman in the 1970s, and it is after she retires that her life takes a dark turn. Her mother suffers a stroke and her best friend, Margaret--a pastry chef--is diagnosed with stage IV cancer of the tongue and loses her sense of taste. Susan spends her days tending alternately to each. She develops a food puree cooking method using the beauty of simple ingredients and natural colors to appeal to Margaret's sense of sight, cooking for her eyes. A practicing and passionate musician, Susan uses Beethoven's Sonata No. 8 as a guideline for her story filled with family, life, music, food, joy, sorrow, and death.

What caught my interest in this book at first was not only the mix of music and food but the relationship between the novel and a sonata. I don't normally read such emotional novels but I felt this was one I could really delve into. It was a bit of a slow build as we traveled through Susan's life to reach the point she begins to "cook for someone's eyes" but I believe there was a reason for that: to highlight the relationship she had with her mother. In the end of the novel, when all the ends began to meet, I felt that I had been on a bit of a spiritual journey. It was enlightening, joyous, sad, and even triumphant. The author includes the sonata form at the end of the novel and explains how she used it to format her work, which I personally found very interesting and greatly appreciated.

I feel the cover could have been made more inviting, though I do appreciate how the black and white speaks to a loss of taste by the absence of color. The dialogue also felt a little awkward because there were so many sentences that ended in exclamation points, but this is a very minor flaw and could be just a matter of personal taste. Nevertheless, this book was a beautiful journey and I do recommend if you enjoy novels that combine music, food, and family.

You can find Susan's cooking blog here:
https://theartandarchitectureofpuree.com/

Thank you Quarter Rest Publications for providing an eARC via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

A gentle, lovely read discovering the life of Susan Uehara Rakstang. It was fascinating to read her challenges when training to be an architect and being let go from her first job as she was married and other people working there were single; to setting up her own practice and starting a completely new career.

At the heart is her mother from Okinawa, Japan. It is not until the end of the book that you understand how hard it was for her to integrate into American society. Instead, you get a picture of someone to whom food is the way to people's hearts. Her delicious Japanese dishes are found throughout the book.

Susan used food herself to tempt her friend with cancer to eat and created the Art and Architechture of Puree blog which is well worth a visit.

I had to keep putting the book down. I needed to have a break as I got quite emotional reading some of the chapters. The book reminded me a lot of my own relationship with my own mother and my grandmother.

I received a copy of this book as a free Advance Reader Copy from NetGalley in exchange for my honest opinion.

Content warning: This book includes scenes with grief, the death of a family member, and the story of a person undergoing treatment for cancer. All of these are key to the book.

Cooking for Her Eyes: Transcription of a Sonata is the very gentle memoir of Susan Uehara Rakstang. It’s a story that starts and ends with love, and is a story about Susan as much as it is the story of her family and, in particular, her mother.

Reading the book was like meeting a dear friend for coffee and catching up on their life in bursts. Susan’s story is interesting and her achievements and tenacity impressive.

My biggest challenges in reading this book were understanding when in history each scene was happening, and in the very raw scenes of grief in the second half of the book. I found it difficult to identify when things were happening: while the book follows an almost constantly linear progression through time, it isn’t always upfront about when things are happening and jumps so quickly between scenes that I had some difficulty following what was going on.
The first half of the book provides the context for Rakstang’s story, but I felt that much of Rakstang’s focus was on the second half: it felt both raw and very carefully thought out. The first half of the book rockets through her life, and the second half slows right down to look at her relationships with her mother and her best friend, and the difficulties these very beloved people faced. I had to put the book down several times in order to finish it.

I think I would have gotten a lot more out of this story if I had any familiarity with music and was able to understand the pacing to the sonata. The book is clearly well thought out and seems designed as an experience for the senses.

I received an ARC from Netgalley.

Susan tells her story of growing up as a Japanese American living in the Chicago and how food infused her life as she became a female architect in Chicago during the late 70s and early 80s.

Excellent read. It was a memoir of an ordinary person who didn't let gender barriers stop her and learned to become successful in business and in life. She shares stories about life and food.

The structure is odd. It is broken into 3 parts with the first taking up most of the book. It has continuity but there is little time reference as to know what year it is and many years may pass between life segments

This is a very endearing book that touches on a number of subjects that impact the author's life. I didn't understand the sonata part of it until I got to the very end and then I had to admire the cleverness of the author. You can tell she is an architect as you read; she built something with this book.
It's a memoir of a successful woman who has so much energy that it almost defies belief, but it is certainly something to aspire to.

If you like memoir, and are a foodie, here you'll go! Beautiful food imagery with a variety of Japanese (Okinawan) dishes. You follow a lovely family from their early days in the 50s to present day. A lovely story for a warm day, snuggled in a blanket.

The publisher’s description gives you a good idea of what to expect from this memoir. I enjoyed Susan Uehara Rakstang’s writing style, which is often quite sensuous. Some aspects of her story interested me more than others, and I had trouble keeping track of all of the different people, but I’m glad that I read this.

I particularly enjoyed reading the author’s descriptions of cooking, music, and architecture. I thought that structuring the story based on Beethoven's Sonata No. 8, C minor, Opus 13 (Pathétique) was an interesting idea, but I’m not sure how well it works for those of us who are not very familiar with Beethoven's work. At times when reading the story, I could sense the tempo and emotion of the music it must represent, but at other times, the flow of the story just seemed a bit awkward and choppy. If you’re not familiar with the Sonata Pathétique, I recommend listening to it before you read this book so you have a better sense of what the author is trying to accomplish.

I am glad the author included an appendix with her analysis of the sonata and how it relates to her story, but without any knowledge of music theory, it’s difficult to follow.

Another appendix included descriptions of foods served at a party described in the story. Endnotes explain some of the potentially unfamiliar cultural or technical terms, as well as references.

I would particularly recommend this book to foodies and fans of Classical music, or those who enjoy experimental literature.

I was provided an unproofed ARC through NetGalley that I volunteered to review.