The Book of Difficult Fruit: Arguments for the Tart, Tender, and Unruly (with recipes)

This is remarkable writing....compelling, instructive, moving and thought provoking all rolled into one book . A singular talent...original

Basically sn enjoyable read. I find the information about the selected fruits interesting, the suthor's essays on various topics less so.

Lebo's investigations of fruit open into questions of self, allowing recipes to reverberate into charms for good living. Each entry is utterly captivating in its language and story, and I'm clearing out a whole cabinet in my kitchen to put up jars of her concoctions all summer.

This made for a wide-ranging discussion in our book club this evening. For one of us (ok, me) it seemed at first just a highly organized book about fruit, with an increasingly invasive narrator. Then Juniper was more overtly an essay and its berries (tiny cones we now know) a vehicle for well researched history and insightful lessons on life. Like some difficult people or things in life, these fruits aren't intrinsically difficult -- they're just difficult for our own psyches or bodies.One of us drew the parallel to The Overstory from two months ago, again using flora to place us in something much bigger. He found this book "stunning and beautiful," noting the contrast of "rangy essays as messy as eating overly ripe fruit" while embedded in "OCD-level organization" of the book. Another found it "a treat to be picked up and enjoyed in bites" like the blackberries on rambling brambles.We were impressed, giving a mean grade of A (beating The (Pulitzer winning) Overstory!), in a range of A- to A+.