I’m back on the TLC Book Tour and with such a great book— Memories of the Lost by Barbara O’Neal.
About Memories of the Lost:
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing (July 30, 2024)
Hardcover: 285 pages
An unsuspecting artist uncovers her late mother’s secrets and unravels her own hidden past in a beguiling novel by the USA Today bestselling author of When We Believed in Mermaids.
Months after her mother passes away, artist Tillie Morrisey sees a painting in a gallery that leaves her inexplicably lightheaded and unsteady. When a handsome stranger comes to her aid, their connection is so immediate it seems fated, though Liam is only visiting for a few days.
Working on her own art has always been a refuge, but after discovering a document among her mother’s belongings that suggests Tillie’s life has been a lie, she begins to suffer from a series of fugue states, with memories surfacing that she isn’t even sure are her own. As her confusion and grief mount, and prompted by a lead on the painting that started it all, Tillie heads to a seaside village in England. There, she hopes to discover the source of her uncanny inspirations, sort out her feelings about Liam, and unravel truths that her mother kept hidden for decades.
The fluidity of memory, empowering strength of character, beauty of nature, and love of family braid together in this artful tapestry of a novel.
About the Author
Barbara O’Neal is the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling author of more than a dozen novels of women’s fiction, including the #1 Amazon Charts bestseller When We Believed in Mermaids, This Place of Wonder, and The Starfish Sisters. Her award-winning books have been published in more than two dozen countries. She lives on the coast of Oregon with her husband, a British endurance athlete who vows he’ll never lose his accent. To learn more about Barbara and her works, visit www.barbaraoneal.com.
What I thought…
When Lisa at TLC Book Tours contacted me about this book, I jumped at it. O’Neal’s novels are not only full of food (right up my alley), but she also creates characters that you root for and love. Most of the time the characters are flawed but you still can’t help being in their corner. I previously reviewed The Lost Girls of Devon and The Art of Inheriting Secrets. You can read all my TLC reviews of her books here. I guess I’m a fan. (I’ve also read When We Believed in Mermaids and rated it five stars on GoodReads.)
Note that this is coming from someone who professes to not like romances.
I think O’Neal goes far beyond the romance genre. Her books are about the characters, their quests, and their healing.
While I will have to say that there were a couple of things that I wanted tied together in the novel (no spoilers), I read this book in record time and immediately started sending out recommendations to friends to read it as soon as they were able.
Tillie, the main character, refers to the recently deceased Arlette as a her “witchy, hippy mother” (6). There are a lot of these mothers in the book from Arlette to Clare to Sage. I loved the hippy vibe and that’s one thing that Liam and Tillie bond over, their unconditional upbringings with their hippy-dippy matriarchs.
I usually list all the food I find in a book but this list is just too lengthy. There’s lots of vegetarian food and “hippy” food. In fact, I love that both Liam and Tillie are drawn to health food stores and the aroma sparks childhood memories for them: vitamins, patchouli, dried ginger, yeast (67). So, needless to say there are a lot of sprouts and granola and vegetarian fare.
There’s also a lot of chocolate references as one of the characters, Sage, is literally saved by chocolate and makes delicious infusions.
I was drawn to two recipes, honey cake (which Liam remembers from his mother’s recipe). It’s made with orange zest and honey (no sugar) and soaked in a honey syrup. The other recipe was sunflower bread (or seedy bread) mentioned numerous times and made by at least three characters over the years.
I decided on trying a honey cake. Here’s my first rendition.
Honey-Orange Cake
I added zest and the orange-infused syrup to the original recipe and updated the instructions a bit.
Ingredients
- 3 large eggs
- 1/3 c. honey
- zest of one orange (or other citrus to your preference)
- 1 c. flour
- Honey-orange syrup (see recipe below)
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 325°F. Grease the interior of a 7″ round nonstick springform cake pan. Line the bottom with parchment paper.
- Place the eggs, honey and zest in the bowl of a stand mixer with the whisk attachment. Beat on highest speed for about 10 minutes or until the mixture becomes more than triple in volume.
- Sift in half of the flour (1/2 cup). Gently fold the sifted flour into the egg mixture with a spatula. You want to be very gentle in the folding and only fold until you no longer see any flour. Repeat with the rest of the flour, continuing with the gentle folding.
- Pour batter into prepared cake pan. Bake for about 25 minutes or until surface is a medium brown and tooth pick inserted comes out clean. Let cake cool completely before serving. While the cake cools, make the honey syrup. (See recipe below.)
- Drizzle the honey-orange syrup over surface of the cooled cake before cutting and serving.
Yield: 1 cake (6-8 servings)
Honey-Orange syrup:
Take 1/4 c. honey and 1 /4 c. water and place in a glass measuring cup. Place in microwave for 30 second intervals, stirring after each until honey is dissolved and you have a syrup. Then add about 1 T. of fresh orange juice and stir. Drizzle as much as you think is needed over cake. (If you don’t use all of it, refrigerate it for later and use in cocktails.)
Flat pancake-like cake out of the oven.
Drizzled with the honey-orange syrup.
I am leaving this recipe up but it didn’t turn out the best. It was very flat and eggy. And I can’t even imagine it without the orange zest and the honey-orange syrup. More research and development is needed.
I may revisit my Three-Seed Bread (which originally had sunflower seeds in it) and I hope it turns out better than this flat cake. I really wish O’Neal had included a recipe the sunflower seed bread, a pivotal plot point, in the book.
Thanks to TLC and O’Neal for the opportunity to read and review this book. I’m also linking up with Foodies Read.
Thanks for the review, I hadn’t read anything of O’Neal’s in some time and am glad for the reminder. It sounds like a good book. Too bad about the cake, but it goes with the cooking territory!
I don’t think I have ever read this author. I’ll have to check her out. I’m sorry your didn’t have a good an ending as the novel.