The Book Tour Stops Here: A Review of "The Accidentals" by Minrose Gwin Served with a Recipe for Welsh Rarebit

Happy Thursday! It's been a long and busy week and I want nothing so much as to get started on my weekend. A good way to do that is by an engrossing novel, paired with a comfort food snack. I'm happy to be today's stop on the The Accidentals by Minrose Gwin. My review is accompanied by a recipe for Welsh Rarebit, a dish inspired by the book.

Publisher's Blurb:

Following the death of their mother from a botched backwoods abortion, the McAlister daughters have to cope with the ripple effect of this tragedy as they come of age in 1950s Mississippi and then grow up to face their own impossible choices—an unforgettable, beautiful novel that is threaded throughout with the stories of mothers and daughters in pre-Roe versus Wade America.

"Life heads down back alleys, takes sharp left turns. Then, one fine day it jumps the track and crashes.”

In the fall of 1957, Olivia McAlister is living in Opelika, Mississippi, caring for her two girls, June and Grace, and her husband, Holly. She dreams of living a much larger life–seeing the world and returning to her wartime job at a landing boat factory in New Orleans. As she watches over the birds in her yard, Olivia feels like an “accidental”—a migratory bird blown off course.

When Olivia becomes pregnant again, she makes a fateful decision, compelling Grace, June, and Holly to cope in different ways. While their father digs up the backyard to build a bomb shelter, desperate to protect his family, Olivia’s spinster sister tries to take them all under her wing. But the impact of Olivia’s decision reverberates throughout Grace’s and June’s lives. Grace, caught up in an unconventional love affair, becomes one of the “girls who went away” to have a baby in secret. June, guilt-ridden for her part in exposing Grace’s pregnancy, eventually makes an unhappy marriage. Meanwhile Ed Mae Johnson, an African-American care worker in a New Orleans orphanage, is drastically impacted by Grace’s choices.

As the years go by, their lives intersect in ways that reflect the unpredictable nature of bird flight that lands in accidental locations—and the consolations of imperfect return.

Filled with tragedy, humor, joy, and the indomitable strength of women facing the constricted spaces of the 1950s and 60s, The Accidentals is a poignant, timely novel that reminds us of the hope and consolation that can be found in unexpected landings.

Paperback: 416 pages 

Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks (August 13, 2019)

My Review:

The Accidentals is my first time reading one of Minrose Gwin's books, I was drawn to the tour based on the publisher's description of two sisters whose lives are forever impacted by a choice their mother makes. The title refers to vagrant birds, accidentals who stray outside their expected territories, It also alludes to several characters in the books feeling like they don't belong. I will confess that I had a hard time getting into the story at first, not particularly liking Olivia, wife to Holly and mother of Grace and June. This changed once the book got into the girls' adolescence and I found myself hooked. The story is told from multiple points of view and moves forward and back in time, which meant I had to follow along carefully to make sure I knew who was talking and in what time frame, but it also made the story interesting to see the different impressions of events the characters had. It also meant the author didn't get as in depth with some of the events and characters as I would have liked and there were plenty of loose ends that I wanted to have more of a resolution--it felt a bit disjointed. Any small frustrations I had were balanced out with the beauty of the writing, it's lush and evocative and a pleasure to read. Grace and June go through a lot in the book which covers multiple decades, but there is enough humor to lighten up some of the darker moments. The sisters make some questionable choices but it is understandable since their family structure is so unstable and rather than fault them for it, I wanted things to turn out okay for them both. I don't want to go into much about how the story unfolds as I think that this is a book to walk into without a lot of details and just enjoy the journey, but if you like historical fiction--spanning from the 1950s to close to present day, stories about women  and sisters, southern fiction, and family  drama and relationships, I recommend giving The Accidentals a try. 

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Author Notes: Minrose Gwin is the author of The Queen of Palmyra, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick and finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award, and the memoir Wishing for Snow, cited by Booklist as “eloquent” and “lyrical”—“a real life story we all need to know.” She has written four scholarly books and coedited The Literature of the American South. She grew up in Tupelo, Mississippi, hearing stories of the Tupelo tornado of 1936. She lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Find out more about Minrose at her website.

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Food Inspiration:

Food plays a bigger roll in The Accidentals than I  originally thought it would. There’s a somewhat funny but also poignant scene after Olive’s death where Grace and June are cooking Coq au vin in the kitchen. Holly is going barely going through the motions of life and his daughters are not eating well so June gets out her mother’s cookbook to get some decent food on the table. For some reason she picks coq au vin even though she has not way to get some of the ingredients. She subs or omits many of them—especially notable is her use of her father’s cherry bounce (homemade moonshine) in place of wine and brandy. I was expecting someone to get food poisoning or burn up during the making of the dish, but the family survives, and June becomes a proficient cook.

Other food mentions included cherry bounce, Rice Krispies, egg and olive salad at the local drugstore, Christmas hams, roast, grilled cheese sandwiches, Sazerac, lemonade, fruitcake, mashed potatoes, gumbo, field peas, cucumber, orange juice, sloppy joes, hot dogs, cheese toast, coffee, popcorn, scrambled egg, bread, spaghetti, oysters on the half shell, rabbit cake, smothered cabbage, boiled artichokes, pickled beets, piled red beans and ham hock, on steaming mounds of rice, mirliton squash (chayote) stuffed with shrimp, chili-mac, biscuits and gravy, chocolate ripple ice cream, chicken, turkey, potato salad, Jell-O molds, dumplings, hotcakes with sorghum molasses, Beanee Weenees, raw cookies made with Crisco, sugar and flour, chess pie, leg of lamb with mint jelly, Chey Boyardee over white bread, hamburgers, frozen French fries, leftover chicken pot pie, grape Nehi, coconut cake, peanut butter and jelly and peanut butter and banana sandwiches, Cherry Coke, Fritos, po’boys, "angel wings” (a dessert June makes of angel food cake, custard, and meringue), grapefruit, cinnamon toast and a hard-boiled egg, Twinkies, Moon Pies, Almond Joy, peach cobbler, root beer floats, fudge, stewed chicken in brown gravy, devils food cake with angel icing, meatloaf, creamed corn, potatoes, biscuits and eggs, apple cobbler with vanilla ice cream, apple and potato hash, salmon slathered in miso and maple syrup, almond pound cake with raspberry glace, "monstrous mutations of cream of mushroom casserole," spaghetti, and a whole wheat vegetarian soy cheese lasagna.

For my book-inspired dish I decided to make Welsh Rarebit because when June is missing Grace when she is sent away she thinks of them cooking supper together and "creamy Welsh rarebit: is one of the dishes mentioned. I looked to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Perfect Welsh rarebit recipe from BBC food, making a few substitutions based on my preferences and what I had on hand (noted in red below).

Perfect Welsh Rarebit
From Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall via BBCFood.com
(Serves 4)

50g/2oz flour

50g/2oz butter

250ml/9oz strong beer, warmed (I used hard cider)

250g/9oz strong cheddar, grated (I used smoked gouda)

2 tsp English mustard

2 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce

black pepper

4 large slices granary bread (I used Japanese Toast aka Shoku Pan)

In a small saucepan melt the butter and make a roux with the flour. Cook for a couple of minutes, stirring to prevent the roux from burning. Stir in the warm beer by degrees, until you have a thick but smooth sauce. Add the grated cheese and stir until melted. You should now have a thick paste. Mix in the mustard and Worcestershire sauce and season well with black pepper.

Lightly toast and butter the bread, then pile up the cheesy mixture on each slice. Cook under a hot grill for a few minutes, until browned and bubbling.

Notes/Results: My rarebit isn't so traditional with the smoked Gouda, hard cider and the thinly sliced Japanese toast bread (as its called at my local grocery), but the flavor worked and it was certainly rich and very tasty and the perfect treat after a long hard day. I cut the recipe in half and just heated up one which was plenty for dinner. My toast corners got a bit overdone but it didn't take away my enjoyment of the bubbly cheese toast. I will happily make it again.

I'm sharing this post with the Weekend Cooking event at Beth Fish Reads, a weekly event that is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share. For more information, see the welcome post.

I'm also linking up this open-faced sandwich with Souper (Soup, Salad & Sammie) Sundays right here at Kahakai Kitchen. Anyone with a soup, salad or sandwich is welcome to join in. Details on how to participate are on this week's post.

 
Note: A review copy of "The Accidentals" was provided to me by the author and the publisher, via TLC Book Tours. I was not compensated for my review and as always, my thoughts and opinions are my own. 

You can see the other stops for this TLC Book Tour and what other bloggers thought of the book here.