There is something very touching and sort of mildly heartbreaking about this work, which depicts in such illuminating detail just how personally destructive racism and sexism can be, each in their own vicious way. And yet it’s a story not really about either of those things, since the focus, ostensibly, is on a missing person case. Set as it is against the backdrop of mid-20th-century Cambridge, and then late-20th-century Ohio, and exploring a racism and sexism that is insidious and wicked but not quite as dramatically violent as the iconography of the Civil Rights Movement, this story is a kind of revisionist look at what these sorts of bigotries felt like. No one, exactly, comes out looking like a saint here: everyone has a sort of blindness to the feelings of others, everyone has a sort of wickedness of his or her own. And yet all of the characters are sympathetic in their own way, even Jack, the appointed villain.

All of these themes are tied together in a cookbook passed down through the generations of the Lee family, albeit inadvertently and certainly without any clarity of meaning. This book is a clear symbol of normative mid-century values and all of the soft bigotry they convey. It’s a crystallization of the fine line that one sometimes has to walk between fighting that bigotry, and accommodating the world as it is, making a place for oneself and loved ones. I think it is perhaps a somewhat blunt object in conveying this kind of meaning, but it does have a nice emotional power.

As a story I thought this book was well-written and engaging, but I do think it was a little blunt in conveying its message (thought-provoking and worthwhile though that message was.) On the whole, definitely worth a look.