THE GLASS KITCHEN by Linda Francis Lee

Title: The Glass Kitchen
Author: Linda Francis Lee
Genre: Romance
Blurb:With the glass kitchen,
Linda Francis Lee has served up a novel that is about the courage
it takes to follow your heart and be yourself.
A true recipe for life.

 Portia Cuthcart never intended to leave Texas. Her dream was to run the Glass Kitchen restaurant her grandmother built decades ago. But after a string of betrayals and the loss of her legacy, Portia is determined to start a new life with her sisters in Manhattan . . . and never cook again. But when she moves into a dilapidated brownstone on the Upper West Side, she meets twelve-year-old Ariel and her widowed father Gabriel, a man with his hands full trying to raise two daughters on his own. Soon, a promise made to her sisters forces Portia back into a world of magical food and swirling emotions, where she must confront everything she has been running from. What seems so simple on the surface is anything but when long-held secrets are revealed, rivalries exposed, and the promise of new love stirs to life like chocolate mixing with cream. The Glass Kitchen is a delicious novel, a tempestuous story of a woman washed up on the shores of Manhattan who discovers that a kitchen—like an island—can be a refuge, if only she has the courage to give in to the pull of love, the power of forgiveness, and accept the complications of what it means to be family.

The glass kitchen, when I saw it on +Facebook I thought it was a cookbook and overlooked it, but then it kept popping up on my news feed and I finally read what it was about.  It peaked my interest and I requested it on +NetGalley and the rest is history.

Portia Cuthcart is dying.  Okay, not literally dying but close enough.  Tragedy has befallen Portia at more than one intervals in her live, the latest one has her being homeless and almost penniless.  Portia must now move to New York, to her apartment that was left to her and her two sisters, which is old and worn down. 

On her very first day there, she encounters the owner of the of the other two apartments that her sisters sold their share too.  Seeing as how she promised to sell her apartment to him as well, but decided against it at the last minute, Portia wants to avoid him at all cost, least he wants to ask her to sell again.

Gabriel Kane is man who people want to get a piece of since he represents power and money.  He’s the type of man who seem to have the world in his hands put in reality, his world is falling apart.

After his wife died, he is left to raise his two daughters on  his own.  This becomes really difficult seeing as he was distant towards them before his wife died and it does not go over well that he moves them from their home into this new place.

Gabriel is perplexed by the strange woman who showed up at his home, and all attempts to talk to her are put off since they annoy each other so much that they just had to get away from the other.  But there was no denying the heat simmered between them.

They were helped along by Gabriel daughter Ariel , who wants her dad to be happy, or distracted enough to lay off a little from her and her sister all while having to fight her own demons.

It seems like everyone is try to fight the impossible fight all by themselves when all they really need is each other.

But dark forces are at play that breaks apart what little semblance of peace that they all were able to achieve.  Can they put back the pieces of their lives and somehow find a way to make all the pieces fit together?  

Of course they can, with a little bit of magic, and I’m not talking figuratively, there is actual magic in this book. I know I have piqued your interest; but you have to read the book to find out.  +Linda Francis Lee book “The Glass Kitchen” is being published on 17th July, 2014, so look out for it, it’s simply magical. 

Thoughts: I loved the magic in this book (hint, hint)
Grade: A