The Woman Who Never Cooked

by Mary L. Tabor

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0922811687
• ISBN13: 9780922811687
• Release Date: January 2006
• Publisher: Mid-List Press
• Length: 175 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

The Talented Mary Tabor

Mary Tabor's writing is powerful, evocative, and tender in "The Woman Who Never Cooked." All the stories are incredible, but both the title story and "Sine Die" left me in tears. I am haunted by these stories and I find that lines and passages keep coming back to me during the day. I feel for all her characters; devastation, loss, anger, and betrayal keep swelling up inside me as I go through the routine of my day at the office. When reading the collection, I would have to sit for a moment after finishing each story to allow its depth to settle before I could continue reading. Tabor creates worlds that are impossible to leave and characters that are impossible to forget. I read the stories again knowing how they would end, knowing what was inevitable, but wondering and hoping that maybe it might be different this time. I could speak endlessly about the fluid prose or the expertly crafted imagery, but for me the real testament to Tabor's talent is that I find myself focusing on how the stories made me feel. Tabor makes it impossible to consider yourself separate from the tales she masterfully spins. I highly recommend this collection to those who want to get lost in beautiful storytelling, in worlds filled with love, hurt, mortality, and ultimately forgiveness in spite of it all. You will not be disappointed.

Food for the heart

This book is a gift to those who read it. In a collection of linked short stories Mary Tabor has braided a beautiful pigtale. Strands of love and loss are expertly linked; the author slips from one to the other and you will be hard pressed to find the seams. It reads like a memoir, but who knows what is fact, what is fantasy. My only problem with the book is its title "The Woman who Never Cooked", for the author has cooked up a rare concoction. It not only made me hungry in the corporal sense, but made me ravenous for more stories by this accomplished writer. Some of the stories, at the end, pack an unexpected emotional punch that took my breath away. I will not tell you which ones, you will soon find out if you read these sensitive vignettes as you must. Nowhere have I read words that evoke such anguish for the loss of a mother. These stories about family and love go to the heart of life, and touched my heart deeply.

DANCE OF DELIGHT

Mary Tabor's exuberant collection is a glorious celebration of life in the midst of suffering, a feast of love and a dance of delight, an absolute immersion in sensory pleasures. This is the work of a mature artist, a woman intimately familiar with personal loss who is capable of plunging to the heart of pain, and equally capable of transcending the most devastating circumstances. These stunning stories are intricate and subtle, restrained on the surface and explosive at the center. Mary Tabor is a poet whose exquisite attention to unexpected detail will open you wide with joy and wonder.

The Bitter and the Sweet

I've been in love with Mary Tabor's work since I read her first published story. How thankful I am now for this collection.These eleven stories feature characters,driven by hunger, who are unable to resist the mysteries of their lives, the dark worlds they find themselves moving through, and the sensual pleasures that give them relief. Mary Tabor's characters face the hardships of their lives with wit and charm in these richly textured stories about the way we live and love, and the accomodations we make for the sake of our longing. Consider the tremendously tantalizing opening line of the title story: "There once was a woman with three hundred and twenty-seven cookbooks who never cooked." At the end of the story, this once accomplished cook, after recalling the loss of her mother and sister, and her father's impending death from Parkinson's disease, decides to make her father's favorite dessert, a lemon meringue pie. The story ends with the cook and the author refusing to pass moral judgment on the world's poor treatment: "She did not know what she deserved or what was just. She knew only that she would make the pie, that it would be hard to make and that it would be her favorite." So it is with all the stories in this collection--well crafted and made from all life's ingredients, the bitter and the sweet.

Mary Tabor's Superb New Book

I immensely enjoyed "The Woman Who Never Cooked," a superb collection of fascinating, nuanced, and intriguing stories, several of which I'd read when they were originally published elsewhere. I think repeated readings enhance your appreciation of their texture and depth. You notice new things each time (like in a song by Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen). This time I've been struck by how cinematic some of the stories are, with characters appearing in color or black and white. The story "the Burglar" called to mind Hitchcock's MARNIE in which Sean Connery is sexually attracted to Tippi Hedren, partly because she is a habitual thief. Overtones of TO CATCH A THIEF too. In "Trouble with Kitchens," a character named Eliot from an earlier story reappears and provides a new perspective on the same events previously seen through the eyes of another character. Pure Tarantino! These stories could make for a fascinating film. Woody Allen, Barry Levinson, Jim Jarmusche: read this book! Raymond K. Connolly, Washington, D.C. USA