This book highlights the struggles and the constant juggling act of motherhood and everyday life stressors. An enjoyable read

Tori Haschka's "A Recipe for Family" is an antidote to the challenges of parenting in the twenty-first century, brimming with camaraderie, belly-laughs, and scrumptious page-turning suspense. It was a fantastic book, and I devoured it!

Set in the northern beaches of Sydney, Recipe for Family is the story of three women of three different generations.

Stella is a working mother of a four-year-old and step mother to a 14 year old. Her husband’s job has him for long periods and her mother has dementia. Her job is demanding and she finds herself struggling to balance job, family, house and a social life.

She is convinced to hire an au pair. Eighteen-year-old Eva arrives from the USA to fill the role. Ava has her own struggles following the death of her mother, but her memories are kept alive through a series of envelopes with messages, and recipes, to cope with any situation.

Stella’s mother-in-law, Elise, is a highly qualified industrial chemist and staunch feminist. She has her own issues with her job and matters from the past.

The story follows each of the women and their struggles to juggle expectations and relationships.

It was an interesting concept and enjoyable enough read but I felt it was a bit slow in parts.

Throughout the story reference is made various food and dishes appropriate for occasions. The recipes for these are included at the back of the book.

Thank you to NetGalley, Simon & Schuster and Tori Haschka for providing a copy for review.

An amazingly fun book about life, family and all the tribulations with great recipes along the way. It will make you laugh and cry at the same time. Everyone will be able to relate to some part of this.

Australian fiction is gaining popularity at home as well as overseas. I loved "A ]recipe for family" and will be following this author with interest. The observations of people, life and situations remind me of Liane Moriarty books.

"A recipe for family" is an easy read but a deep one. It grapples with issues such as working mothers, can a stranger become a family member, and what makes a family family.

A good story about Stella who is trying to be a good mum, good career woman and good wife and Ava, who is looking for a change after the death of her mother. When they are brought together thanks to the recipes Ava's mum left behind, they find it is easier to be on the same team.

I read A Recipe for Family at the right time. As someone going through motherhood myself I could relate to Stella so much it was scary.
Being able to read from both Stella's and Ava's perspective was interesting because both had really good points for what they were doing and neither seemed to be in the wrong.
I loved how this book gave me big litte lies vibes.

Fist time read of this author Tori Haschka.

The story travels along with a families ups and downs and their day to day problems and concerns.

At the beginning it was a little all over the place, but that is family life and the more I read the more I enjoyed. The main character, Stella a mother, wife, step-mother and daughter and her day to day life with her husband, an actor, away a lot. A decision is made to employ an au-pair. This is a whole new experience for Stella and her family and Ava the au-pair.

A fun and crazy book that is enjoyable and busy just like life!

Who are we? Are we mothers, daughters, workers, wives, friends? What part of each day, of each hour are we playing what role? Are you confused? Try living in Stella's shoes.
A Recipe for Family is just that, a look at what we are striving to be and what makes us content if not happy. It is a look at finding that kernel of truth and concentrating on in, homing on it, landing and letting yourself be.
'Three women, drawn together by impossible circumstances, will discover that the greatest comfort can often be found in the mess,: Stella a workaholic with a stepdaughter and pre-schooler, Ava an au pair, Elise Stella's mother-in-law, single mother and strong woman herself.
We are told the story from 3 points of view. Each of them have their own truth and their own path...and once they find it..
Tori Haschka is very attentive to her characters and very thorough. I enjoyed this look at womanhood, motherhood and everything in between.

Thank you Netgalley and Simon & Schuster (Australia) for the opportunity to read and review this.

Stella is a struggling mother, whose husband, Felix, is away a lot for work, is holding down the fort with her job as well as managing the household with her four-year-old daughter, Natalie, and teenage stepdaughter Georgie. Joining the throng of local mothers, she reluctantly hires an au pair in the hope that it will lighten the load, Ava, an 18-year-old American who recently lost her mother.

Stella's mother-in-law Elise, doesn't think this is a good idea but promises her son not to meddle, finds herself facing her own battles at work, facing ghosts from her past.

Lastly, Ava, the au-pair that Stella hires, finds that life in Sydney helps fills the void left by the loss of her mother. With her family recipes in her hand and hope in her heart, she sets off to reinvent herself in a place far away.

I found this to be an enjoyable read, and would definitely recommend it.

This was my first experience reading Tori Haschka and “A Recipe for Family” did not disappoint.

This is the story of the lives of Elise, Stella, and Ava. Each woman is at a very different stage of their life and trying to find their way through life’s challenges of work, grief, love, motherhood, daughterhood, friendships and social pressures.

There are funny moments where you are laughing out loud, sad moments when you are holding back tears and moments where you just want to scream! This book was “real life” for many women out there and I was able to relate to all three woman.

A fabulous story that I highly recommend. Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster (Australia) for the ARC.

I did not finish this book, which is a shame because it was well-written and held some promise at the beginning. I identified with two of the three main characters and recognised a lot of detail included by the author that made the story feel very real. It just didn't really go anywhere.
The book was quite long, and I made it to about halfway through, however I found myself growing bored with the story. While I did initially like the characters, I wasn't invested enough in their trials to continue reading without some massive hook to drag me along. Perhaps it is just not the right story for me at this time, but it has the makings for an exciting tale for someone looking for more realism and less drama in their books.

On Sydney’s Northern Beaches, Stella is struggling under the load of holding down her job for a wholefoods company and managing the household with her four-year-old daughter Natalie and teenage stepdaughter Georgie. It certainly doesn’t help that husband Felix is away a lot for work, trying to launch a tanning product.
The other women in Stella’s circle all rely on au pairs, so Stella hires Ava, an 18-year-old American who recently lost her mother.
Meanwhile mother-in-law Elise is made redundant as a blast from her past returns.
This story is told from the viewpoints of the three women at different stages of life, offering some social commentary on the pressures of family life and the au pair industry.
Each chapter is peppered with social media gossip from a community group and there are reams of the featured recipes at the end. The only downside: the cover really doesn’t sell itself.

This idea behind this book is absolutely spot on, most families have their day to day struggles! We all do our best to balance our lives, female friendships help, especially when husbands are absent!
I expected to enjoy reading about mums and their everyday lives, I didn’t feel connected to the characters wholeheartedly but some of their stories were relatable!
The Australian connection and recipes were a great addition!

Thanks to the publisher, NetGalley and the author for the opportunity to read this book.
I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

FIrst time reading this author thanks to @netgalley.
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I wasn't totally sure what i was reading.  I struggled to remember characters between pick and put down.  The chapters relate to a different food which was a bit unexpected but it's not a cookbook you don't get the full ingredient list or method, well actually you do at the end. 
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It's a story that took me a good few chapters to get into and it also took me a while to work out who was who. 
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It's a book about life, the struggle is real when you have children,  whether you have full glasses of champagne and diamonds dripping like Brie Jones or find yourself with a dwindling bank account searching for cut price groceries like Stella Prentice.  Sunshine and sea views can still hide mountain sized problems that we all face, just some of us don't have the view.

This book is a journey traversing through teens, stepmothers,  toddlers and kindly age children bound together by wisdom and food lovingly made by the  unseen hands of Ava's mother. 

The final question though should be....does Stella really think 2020 will be any better!

You wouldn’t necessarily know it from looking at the messy clusterf__k that is modern society but people, by and large, like things neat and tidy.

While life by its very unpredictable nature is messily chaotic and rife with glorious inconsistencies, and humanity is more than a little prone to not having their collective ducks in the same room, let alone in a row, the pressure is on, personally and societally, to make it look like everything is pleasingly curated.

Aided and abetted by social media, which allows us to make the imperfect look like a masterclass in flawlessness, and a driving need to have it all together, at least when people are watching, we are hostages to tidying up the grotty edges, an impulse that sees the lead characters in A Recipe for Family by Tori Haschka desperately trying to appear as if they are the ones holding the golden ticket to an endlessly fulfilled and neatly manicured life.

The truth is, of course, far less clean and tidy, and much of the narrative in this wholly immersive, funny and thoughtfully empathetic novel is driven by the pursuit of the flawlessly unattainable which, surprise, surprise, never quite materialises in the way its meant to.

Centred on three women – marketing director Stella, who’s juggling a demanding career, two kids and an often absent, if loving, husband, her mother-in-law Elise, an industrial chemist who has some issues of her own to contend with, and eighteen-year-old Ava who’s in the midst of the life-changing grief of losing her mother and who has arrived in Sydney to be an au pair for Stella’s family – A Recipe for Family is a sagely moving lesson on how the messiness of life may in fact be where we should find ourselves more often if only because the truth of what it means to be human is often found there.

Of course, no one wants to be the one to discover that, or make that admission.

For a start, none of us want to be in that place where the wheels royally fall off and all the organisational charts, strict timetables and out ward declarations of “I’m fine” won’t save us, and that’s a powerful motivator to pretend everything’s on track when we manifestly know it’s not.

For the women of Sydney’s seemingly immaculate Northern Beaches, where money and privilege are second nature, the drive to be the perfect everything is neverendingly intense.

They must look the part, their children must look the part and every last shred of their lives must appear like it’s an Instagram shoot come to life, not a hair out of life, not a drop of sweat shed and no hint that everything is dangling off a cliff on the thinnest of barely supportive wires.

Admitting that you don’t have it all together is forbidden by some weird collective agreement and so people like Stella and her friends, some of whom may not be the kind of people you want around for the duration, soldier on, hoping they’ll make it over the line each night and live to fight another domestic day.

It’s exhausting in the extreme and Haschka does a superlative job of showing how the seams, already unravelling bit by bit, can be pulled conclusively and comprehensively apart, with just the smallest, or most cataclysmic, of events.

For a novel that bases much of its sage storytelling on the power of fabrication and sleight of hand, A Recipe for Family is unwaveringly honest, happy to put up its hand to say that perhaps honesty may be the best policy after all.

Certainly, while extracting the admission from them is like pulling teeth, when Stella and Elise both admit to major changes in their lives, changes they had very much tried to keep under wraps, there is a great amount of freedom that comes with it.

None of them knows at first, in the midst of their perfection frenzy, of course, and so they hamster wheel on, pretzeling themselves into ever tighter shapes in an attempt to have it all when everything may not be all its cracked up to be.

In fact, it’s highly possible that by trying not to have it all, that the things that really matter, that you really want, float to the surface, leaving the pretty dross of a thousand other unnecessary things at the bottom where they belong.

No one wants to be the guinea pig to find that out but in the end, it’s life being life, in all its frightening certainty, that finally forces their hand, changing life for all three women and helping them to see what really matters the most.

Funny, wise and fuelled by a plot that manages to be emotionally intimate and expansively intense, A Recipe for Family cuts to the heart of what it means to be a modern woman, beset by a multitude of demands when all you really want is to be close to those for whom you care.

The driver for all these women is not the perfection they thought they needed, tantalising though that is and let’s face it, who among us doesn’t want a sparkly, shiny, perfect life (they look lovely, honestly), but the people close to them, and A Recipe for Family beautifully explores what that means and how finally discovering the primacy of that, when all the other stuff is stripped away, is liberating and enlivening.

It does, however, come at a great cost, as epiphanies, or even semi-epiphanies often do, and much of the novel looks at how Stella, Elise and Ava, and those in their orbit, try to hold off what they likely suspect deep down is inevitable but which none of them want to embrace until they absolutely have to.

As deep dives into the human psyche go, A Recipe for Family is superb – witty, thoughtful, alive with possibility and burdened by expectation, all of it tied together with a wise understanding, no doubt hard-earned, of what really matters in life and how the finding of that truth, difficult though it is, often doesn’t happen in the Insta-worthy moments but in those places where the tears fall, where hope hangs in the balance and where we find ourselves most vulnerable and truly human.

An enjoyable book about family complexities and busy lives. Stella is struggling with life generally, with a young daughter and an older step daughter. Her husband is largely absent, and frankly sounds like a bit of a jerk. Most of Stella’s friends are unhelpful and self absorbed. Ava, the au pair is really the only nice person in this book! Having said that, I’m sure lots of people can relate to these lives, and the challenges involved. A nice ending wraps up the book.

I really wanted to love this one more! The overall premise is wonderful. There are themes of motherhood, friendship, marriage, balancing work and everyday life. The relationship between food and relationships/memories feature strongly throughout this novel, which was something I really enjoyed. I loved reading about all the characters journeys and had a particular soft spot for Ava. I also enjoyed reading about Stella's mother-in-law, which added to the complexities of relationships.

What didn't work fo me was it fell quite flat during the middle and dragged a little. What did work for me was the aussie setting and the recipes included at the end of the novel, that I am looking forward to trying out. I really enjoy reading books written by australian authors. That said, it was an enjoyable read and I look forward to reading more from the author in the future.

Great read and discussion on how everything a family needs is actually achieved or not and what are we willing to pay for. Loved the recipes at the end.

“A Recipe for Family” is a piece of writing that feels like chick lit in terms of the reading experience, but which is a little too grounded in reality and a little too dark for most people to classify it that way. It is, however, a hugely enjoyable and thought provoking novel.

In Sydney’s Northern Beaches most of the Mums are desperate to present their lifestyle as idyllic and themselves as the perfect mother. There’s a lot of money sloshing around, and that helps to gloss over quite a few things – but it’s far from enough for Stella Prentice.

Stella is going under for the third time – or perhaps the fourth? She doesn’t have time to count. She’s got a four year old daughter who’s terribly sweet, but as demanding as any young child. She’s got a prickly teenage step daughter who lives with her full time. She’s got a husband who’s away far too often, and is far too unhelpful when he’s around. She’s got a demanding job. She’s surrounded by mothers who all seem to have it far more together than she does.

One of the other Mums has been earnestly spruiking the idea that au pairs are the perfect solution to everything. An extra pair of hands, less expensive than professional care, flexible, and almost like part of the family. Stella eventually succumbs to this siren song, and invites Ava, a young American, into her home. Ava, however, has her own problems, and brings them to Stella's home.

There are parts of this novel that feel quite predictable, but that’s mostly because they’re so recognisable. When Haschka depicts the kinds of responses that you get when you ask advice on the internet? Spot on. It feels predictable because you absolutely will get that mix of patronising, hippy dippy, critical, subtly undermining, and practical advice. Probably in very much the tones of voice Haschka’s “posters” use. And it made me both laugh and roll my eyes in equal measures.

In honesty, there’s nothing terribly new here. Any mother, particularly of young children, can tell you how much she’s expected to do, how little she’s acknowledged for it, and how impossible the overall weight of expectations can be. But you’ll enjoy reading this story of women slowly losing their grip and what they do about it.

This is very funny in places, often in a way that borders on black humor. I laughed quite frequently, but often winced, too. I read the novel quickly; it’s not so much that I was desperate to know what would happen next, as that I was completely engaged in the characters’ lives, and Haschka’s writing style made it easy to keep gliding through.

I recommend this highly. It’s a little bit funny, and lot realistic. If you’re a mother, it’ll make you flinch in sympathy. And it may well cause you to take a good look at your coping mechanisms.