The Book of Perilous Dishes is a solid tale of magic and mischief set in a Bucharest on the verge of moving from Turkish to French influence around 2 centuries ago.

From the perspective of a born and raised Romanian who currently lives in Bucharest, this was a fascinating story that caught my eye immediately. I haven't read the Romanian version, so I jumped at the opportunity to dive into this version. The narrative was split into big chapters of short stories, jumping within a timeline spanning 30 years. Sometimes the short stories flowed well, at other times they seemed a bit disjointed by jumping from one character's point of view to another's, or into different narrative threads. There was also a lot of detail and traces of the flowery and colorful language that is Romanian, making this one a slow read for me, as I often needed time to process the details before moving forward. That said, the story was thrilling, the characters were charming, and it ends in a very satisfying way that ties all loose ends.

Let's talk about the magic in this book. I've always loved our local flavor of myth and folklore. Romanians are known for having a strong background of superstitions, which came across really well in this story. The magical system borrows a lot from Roman mythology, which is certainly one of the foundations of our nation, and adds a local flair through ingredients and recipes that are said to have special powers. Cooking plays a big part throughout the book, and the recipes range from mouthwatering dishes to shady concoctions. It's a refreshing take on magic that worked really well and felt genuine considering the setting.

My main drawback however is the translation. I understand from the note at the start of the book that a conscious decision was made to keep some of the Romanian terms as they are, for the sake of authenticity, and I understand and appreciate this decision. The glossary and pronunciation guide at the back of the book should make it a bit easier to reference terms. What didn't work as well for me was translating Pâtca's real name, Mâța Vinerii, into Cat 'o Friday as it changed the tone completely in my view. I also noticed a few Romanian phrases translated verbatim. While I was able to understand what something like "put lice into my soul" was supposed to mean, it might confuse non-Romanian readers. Perhaps adapting some of these phrases into natural English language would have been a more accessible choice for foreign readers. You can still definitely catch the meaning out of the context, so if you choose to pick it up, you should still be able to enjoy the story.

All in all, a great story that I'm glad I picked up. If you're looking for a fresh magical story and are a fan of books about cooking, try it out!

✨ Disclaimer ✨ I received a free copy of this book and this is my honest review.

Historical Fantasy
Dark Magic
Epic Adventure
Mystery

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Pâtca is a 14 year Romanian girl who is on a mission to find a family heirloom, a magical recipe book titled ‘The Book of Perilous Dishes.

After her aunt is arrested for practising divination, she travels to her uncle’s house but on arrival she discovers that he has been murdered.
Pâtca then tries to hide the body which then sets the story in motion for a weird and wacky adventure

This is a great book for someone who wants to read something completely different. It has a lot of Romanian folk lore and superstitions and the actual magic system is extremely refreshing.
It is quite hard to understand at times and it took me a long time to finish the book..


I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts are my own.
A huge thank you to Netgalley and Neem Tree Press for this e-arc.

Escaping after authorities coming for her aunt Maxima for practicing divination, fourteen-year-old Pâtca heads for Bucharest to take refuge with her uncle Cuviosu Zăval. She arrives to find her uncle murdered, along with his two servants, and a chef's wife at the door asking for a specific bottle from her uncle. After handing it over, Pâtca leaves the house, but ends up getting captured by a moneylender's goons, and is terrified by him until she gets out.

Soon Pâtca is trying to hide her dead uncle's body, is captured yet again, is told by the local church that her uncle's fortune is to be handed over to the church, and keeps running into the moneylender, and getting embroiled in the doings of a wealthy woman, Caterina, who takes Pâtca in, and the local prince Kostas, who has stolen Caterina's chef Silica (Pâtca met his wife briefly).

Silica begins making dishes for Kostas from a cookbook prized and kept secret by Pâtca's family, The Book of Perilous Dishes, which allows one to control the behaviour of others with carefully selected and unexpected ingredients. The effects of the consumption of Silica's strange dishes, of course, range from odd to disastrous. Pâtca decides to get the book back.

I was eager to read this as it sounded like it would be a lot of fun. And there are some terrific moments and fantastical elements in this book, but the pacing kept lagging, as the prose bogged down with too many details. And though there was some sense that a mystery was at work (where's the book?, who killed the uncle?), this story was more about the history of Bucharest and the many complicated interactions people of various cultures had with one another.

I loved the idea of using unusual dishes to perform dark magic, and the cast of characters was fascinating, and some of the conversations Pâtca has with them are amusing, off the wall, and elliptical, suiting the general feeling of this book, which could easily fall under the magic realism label. So, this is a story with plenty of atmosphere, and strange, magical happenings that everyone just rolls with.

I liked many parts of this book, and just wish it had had a tighter narrative.

Thank you to Netgalley and to Neem Tree Press for this ARC in exchange for my review.

This is an utterly charming novel, full of magic and food, that keep you coming back for more.
I really enjoyed the plot, being an absolutely brilliant idea to have a stolen magical cookbook, a charming adolescent witch who’s the book’s rightful owner and a thief who works as a cook for prince. Adding the gorgeous settings of 18. century Bucharest and almost poetic descriptions of food creations and we have an amazing book, very difficult to put away before finishing it all in one evening. The storytelling is great, the characters are fascinating and the plot is unique.
I’d also like to praise the translation, it’s a very good work.
I have absolutely no negative criticism about this novel, I highly recommend reading it.

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

This is a pretty "no plot just vibes" kind of book, which I hadn't expected when going into it. Not to say that I was disappointed by that, but I was expecting more from the book in terms of plot, based off of what I read in the synopsis. But this was fine? Because I honestly forgot all about the big mystery mentioned in the synopsis. There was other stuff going on that was unrelated to the mystery, like with the politics around the prince and the main character's own family drama. Now that I think about it, this book is pretty plot-y, there was a lot of stuff going on, but somehow it just didn't read that way to me. The narrator, Pâtca, has a tendency to go off tangent, relaying short stories and exposition to the reader which slows down the overall pacing a bunch. I wish the pacing was just a little faster to make the plot more exciting, but at the same time, I really enjoyed reading the short stories.

I felt that the big mystery was resolved a little too easily. I feel like Pâtca made a lot of assumptions without doing much, or enough, sleuthing to come to those conclusions logically, although I suppose that's fine? Because she manages to make the correct assumptions and figure it out in the end.

Another favourite part of mine was the food!! The whole reason I picked up this book in the first place was because I am a big fan of food, and I just love reading food descriptions in books, because it sounds so 😋. The food descriptions in this book were SO GOOD! Each time a new dish is introduced, Pâtca goes into detail describing the process of preparing and making it, as well as some of the history behind it, and stories about its magical properties. I love how detailed and storied each dish was, it was immersive and made me hungry. (Disclaimer: this may not apply to everyone, as I just really love reading about food.)

Something I struggled with were the multitude of Romanian terms. As stated in the translator's note, he made the decision to keep a lot of the terms untranslated, due to a lack of a modern equivalent. While I do appreciate how using the terms lend themselves to authenticity, I had trouble remembering the meanings of all the words, which did take me out of the story at times. There is a glossary at the back of the book, but due to the fact that I'm reading this as an ebook, jumping back and forth to check is more troublesome than bookmarking and flipping through a physical copy.

I appreciate the translator's note a lot, I feel that he put a lot of care into translating the story as accurately as possible, as well as being respectful and researching the culture behind it. And, a lot of the time, I struggle with translated books as the writing can come off as stiff or awkward as they don't translate smoothly into English, but I found the writing in this book to have good flow and the descriptions were vivid.
Overall, a really intriguing and satisfying read!

Thank you @NetGalley and Neem Tree Press for this ARC of The Book of Perilous Dishes by Doina Ruști.

It was such an intriguing book. I thoroughly enjoyed the era of 1798 and all the events described in the book. The amalgamation of age-old recipes with an element of magic and fantasy was so well-done.

This book really takes you back to the time period under consideration. It is a bit slow-paced and had so many names in Romanian or Latin or sometimes in Turkish but the whole idea of Ottoman rulers, Greek princes, the infamous cook, Ismail Bina, Cirta, Dubois, Caterina, Perticari the spiritist, the involvement of Sator, Maxima and Zaval and the narrator Patca was worth all the time I spent reading this book.

The book of perilous dishes in the book with all its curious and weird recipes of various dishes, elixers and potions was such a treat.

It also includes such thoughtful passages and lines about life and emotions in general that I couldn’t help highlighting so many of them.

It jumps from 1798 to thirty years ago and sometimes so many things are happening but after the first few pages, one gets used to the world of Bucharest and the characters involved.

If this book comes to Pakistan, I am definitely going to buy its physical copy.

This is a very interesting novel, deeply anchored in Romanian folklore and superstition.
While the world of this book is fascinating, sadly, it's taken so much for granted that the book loses a lot of tension. As someone who doesn't know that culture well, I couldn't foreshadow any of the implications of people's actions and any of their assumptions, just because I don't know the folk tales or superstitions that ruled everyday lives during that period.
Multiple times, I found myself discovering the true meaning of what had happened chapters later, when the peril was past and the main character had moved to different things. Literally, I would find out the true danger of what she had walked into, way too late to care about it, meaning that I didn't feel any emergency as I was reading and instead it feels a lot like meandering... bad stuff happens, bad stuff is resolved in mysterious way, more bad stuff happens, new mysterious way is used to solve the problem...
I really wanted to like this book but I found it hard to stay engaged.
I would recommend this book to anyone who liked the classic surreal "The Master and Margarita", this novel reminded me a lot of that elusive Devil controlling the minds of people in the city, or readers who are more familiar with the Romanian culture.

Food and recipes are a comfort read for me, add in a dash of magic and I'm all in. My only disappointment is that I got a bit lost in the timelines and the many many threads picked up.

I really enjoyed this book, and I think Doina Rusti did a beautiful job capturing the spirit of that time. This books made me think of Mircea Eliade's books.

However, I was confused for a good part of the book and I really think the issue is the way it was translated. I am a Romanian who grew in Bucharest and moved to Brasov, so I am very familiar with the places were the action takes place, and I was still kind of confused. I have to say that some words used are very old, and even I'm not sure about their meaning at times, and while they are additive to the story in the original language, I feel that in this version, they just confuse the reader. That being said, I think it would have been beneficial to translate them, or at least add a sub-note on the page where that word is used. What I think should not have been translated instead is Patca's actual name. The original name is Mata Vinerii, translated as Cat O' Friday, and while mata can be translated as cat, is more of a derogatory term, and I think that's again, quite important to the story.

That being said, the story is quite captivating, and I intend on reading it in Romanian, following a cult-centered family with magical powers given by some form of sanctity, and a book filled with dishes that have some magical proprieties that we'll learn more about as the story progresses. Unfortunately I don't feel like I can give it 5 stars, because this version of the book is too confusing, and I've seen that many people had this problem.

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book in exchange of my honest review

This book is great if you love a book that has fantasy, magic and murder. Though this is not the usual type of book I read, I enjoyed it. The descriptions of locations put me there and the characters were well developed. My only concern was that at times if my mind wandered even a little, I lost track of what was going on. I would recommend this book to older teens.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC in exchange for my honest feedback.

I just couldn't finish this book for some reason. It was hard to understand at times and I had to re-read sections multiple times. I'm not sure if it was a language barrier type of thing? Because it was in English, but because it is based on Romanian culture, there were a lot of words that I didn't understand and a lot of practices I didn't comprehend. I did actually begin to enjoy the storyline and I was curious to what would happen but then I realized I honestly didn't even understand the plot or what we were working towards. The writing wasn't bad either, I did enjoy the characters and their dialogue and personalities but again I was very lost at some points, I would forget who people were and I didn't know how to pronounce some names. I tried to look them up on the Kindle but it wouldn't work. I had to give up about halfway through. I'm sorry. I may try to pick up the book again in the future.

DNF @ 16%

This is a tough book to rate. In the one hand, I thought the writing was really enjoyable and atmospheric but on the other, I found that I had a hard time following the story. this could in part be because it’s a translation or it could just be the writing style. Either way, I think this is an interesting concept for a book and could be really enjoyable for some, it just wasn’t the book for me

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC!!

Thank you to Net Galley and the Publisher for the ARC. I really thought I might like this book, the cover was cute, and it mentions food. Alas, I think because I am currently very busy with college, I just did not have the mental bandwidth to get through the first few chapters, and understand all the unfamiliar stuff. I think this is a book I would enjoy if I read it when I am less busy.

I really enjoyed the sense of place conveyed by this story, but unfortunately felt the narrative to be too fragmented and overambitious to support the plot. I quickly became confused by the enormous cast of characters, which would have worked better as an ensemble novel rather than a single, first-person POV story. The sheer amount of characters made it challenging to care too much about them, and while I enjoyed the quirky premise and solid writing I couldn't feel invested in the plot of connected enough to the characters to really enjoy the novel. However, this story has made me desperate to visit Bucharest some day!

This book was just okay for me. The names and words were really confusing (I understand that it was translated) and I had to constantly reference the materials in the back. This became really annoying.

Unfortunately I did not understand the plot and overall did not enjoy this story. I found it confusing and difficult to comprehend because of the foreign words. I thought I would enjoy the time period the story was set in, but I did not like it. It wasn't my cup of tea.

I was very intrigued by the synopsis of this book and eagerly looking forward to reading it. Like some of the Romanian folk tales were very interesting but I continually was getting lost and confused that the book fell short of satisfying for me. I'm also a reader who prefers books that have a good balance of dialogue and narrative and this was too heavy on narrative for me. This book just needs to find the right audience. Thank you to NetGalley, the author and publisher for an advanced copy in exchange for my honest opinion.

The premise for this story really captured my attention and that's why I wanted to pick it up. I have never read a book with Romanian influences and with a mix of fantasy in it. With that said maybe this book was't for me. I don't know if it's because it's a translation and I'm missing some of it's nuances but I found it a bit hard to follow and that made it hard for me to focus. There was nothing particularly bad with the writing but narrations jumps times and I found more interest in the mains character quest than on the historical part of it. I did like the concept of a magical book of recipes that have the ability to manipulate emotions, create spells or make elixirs.

Thank You to NetGalley, Neem Tree Press for the opportunity to read this ARC and share my honest opinion.

Unique, refreshing and intriguing!

Silica is a master chef, living and renowned in Bucharest, 1798. He is taken by the Greek prince to be his private chef, however, Silica has a secret. Silica is the guardian of the Book of Perilous Dishes, dishes embued with a dark magic that can have a litany of effects on the consumer, from truth serum to hysteria, amnesia to foresight

However, the book should not reside with Chef Silica. Patca is 14 and an occultist. They want to recover their family's precious recipe book, but when going to retrieve it from its last known resting place, she discovers the murder of her uncle and a clue. Can she recover the book and will she be able to endure through family secrets, a journey across Europe and the power of dark magic

The translation of this book is very much appreciated. I find that sometimes, in translation, books lose their intended cadance and soul, but not in this case. It simmers with the voice of storytellers, of traditional folk tales, celebrating the beauty of Romania in a different time and if you look at a map of Europe in 1800, you will dee the immensity of Patca's journey.

At this point, I would usually describe the authors writing style, which is difficult in a translation, however, as I have mentioned previously, there is a soul to this story that keeps the reader engaged, not least for the exploits of Patca, her resilience and tenacity

A fantastic read

Thank you to Netgalley, Neem Tree Press, the author Doina Rusti and the translator Professor James Christian Brown for this epic arc

Sadly, I do not think this is a story for me. The premise sounds utterly fascinating, a historical fantasy filled with cooking? What could be better? Unfortunately, something about this story did not click with me. Perhaps it is because I do not know a lot about Romanian history, and my lack of knowledge made certain parts of the story complicated to follow. While I do not think this book is for me, I do think that a lot of people will enjoy it. Especially those with a strong interest in medieval Romanian history. Thank you to Netgalley and Neem Tree Press for providing me with an advanced copy in exchange for my honest review.