How to Share an Egg is a heartfelt and flavorful journey that explores the deep connections between food, family, and survival. Bonny Reichert, a chef and journalist, takes us on a poignant trip through her life, shaped by her father’s harrowing experience as a Holocaust survivor and her own journey to uncover her culinary heritage.

This memoir is packed with stories that range from sweet and nostalgic to deeply emotional. Bonny shares moments from her colorful childhood in the restaurant world, her challenges as a mother and writer, and the personal transformation sparked by a bowl of borscht in Warsaw. Her vivid descriptions of food—from baba Sarah’s potato knishes to her father’s comforting brown butter eggs—bring her experiences to life, each dish tying her present to her family's past.

Richert’s writing is as layered as the flavors she describes, blending humor, hope, and heartbreak with equal skill. This isn’t just a book about recipes; it’s about identity, legacy, and the resilience passed down through generations. Her story serves up life lessons as satisfying as the meals she lovingly recounts.

With its mix of sweet, salty, and soul-searching moments, How to Share an Egg is a touching reminder that food can nourish more than just our bodies—it can connect us to our roots and to each other. A truly moving read that left me hungry for more, both in its words and its recipes!

I liked the look into her families history and the food going along with it.
I liked the connection of new dishes and how it helped her connect with her family history.
I feel it's really true how food can connect us through generations.

Thanks NetGalley for this ARC.

Thanks Netgalley for allowing me to read this book. Bonny never questioned her ancestry. While on vacation, she wanted to learn more about food that people ate. . I enjoyed this book.

#HowtoShareanEgg #NetGalley

The author’s food journey begins in childhood, under the patient hands of both her, Baba, and father. It continues as a teen when working at the family restaurant and with a high school trip to France. Then, as a young adult in college,she learns to experiment with limited ingredients to recreate familiar and beloved dishes.

Through all this, she shares her feelings of being unmoored in her first marriage as well as the toxicity of her Chefs in culinary schools.

The first third was a bit frustrating as felt the chapters were separate essays loosely threaded together. As the book progressed, however, her story unfolded a bit more smoothly.

This ARC was provided by the publisher, Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine
via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

How to Share an Egg is Riechert’s story of her father’s survival from the Holocaust as well as her own story of growing up and finding herself in the shadow of his catastrophic background, oftentimes questioning her right to struggle when compared to what her father endured.

Reichert traces key moments from her past, regaling readers not only of the heart and emotion that made each moment significant but of the meal associated with it. From a bowl of borscht in Warsaw to her dad’s special lox brunch to the many baking lessons from her Baba.

I greatly enjoyed Reichert’s storytelling; she writes in a way that makes you want to keep reading. With that said, there were many moments where I felt like I wanted more from the story and I wanted her to go deeper where, instead, she backed off. Reichart chooses to tell her story in snippets or small vignettes, which are mostly about her own journey through life with pieces of her dad's history woven in. Because of the aforementioned I would argue that this book is digestible (no pun intended) for most readers even though it focuses around one glaringly heavy topic.

A story of resiliency and re-building, of family and food, it will definitely be one that I recommend but not one that I would necessarily return to.

I received an arc of this title from NetGalley for an honest review. This book wasn't what I thought it would be, but an impactful story starting in a Nazi concentration camp and finding a way to grow up and have a full life.

How to Share an Egg is a moving memoir about the author's childhood, teenage years, marriage, divorce, remarriage and motherhood. Throughout her journey, she is grappling with her emotions regarding her family, especially her father who is a Holocaust survivor.

I love the descriptions of her family meals and how different foods and meals played a pivotal role in her life as well as the lives of her father, mother and grandmother. I appreciated her story mixed with the great influence that her father's trauma and life choices after the horrors he lived through had on her development and life. I enjoyed the family's trip back to Poland and would have liked more of her father's voice in his life after moving to Canada.

Thank you to Random House Publishing Group who provided an advance reader copy via NetGalley.

A wonderful memoir about food and family. The author was raised by a Holocaust Survivor.. Food has always been a thing for Bonny. The book will give one many emotions.

This was an amazing non fiction book about a woman’s father and the horrors he saw during the Holocaust. It’s about food, family, and strength. It’s very hard to write a review on this kind of book. I have always had strong feelings about the Holocaust, and have read many books about it, I’m not sure why. This book was beautifully heart wrenching. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the early read. I’ve already been telling people to buy this book.

How to Share an Egg is a unique food-centric blend of memoir and father's survival of the Holocaust.

I love reading about food and flavors; and I also enjoy occasional memoirs and history. I highly recommend How to Share and Egg.

I loved the secret of life that Bonny's father told her. "The most important thing is to enjoy life. Just marry a nice boy and be happy. That's all. That's the secret."

Bonny Reichert's 2nd book. (But 1st in the last 20 years and distinctly different than the first.)

Many thanks to NetGalley and Ballantine Books for approving my request to read How to Share an Egg in exchange for an honest review. Approx 304 pages. Expected release is January 2025.

A moving story of survival during the Holocaust. Characters navigating physical challenges whilst encompassing family and food. Well done and left me thinking about choices we make.

A beautifully written story about relationships, generational trauma, and coming to terms with yourself.

Eggs. We love them and they give us nourishment. From my first glance of the cover, it looked like a friendly book about cooking eggs. True, it’s about food and the enjoyment of cooking but there’s a lot more going on in this memoir. It quickly got my attention with a taste of reality.

The reader quickly learned from the start that one egg was shared between two starving Jewish boys during WWII in Poland. They were desperately trying to survive after five years of severe abuse and terror from the Nazis. One of the boys was Bonnie Reichert’s dad. After the war, he found a new life in Edmonton, Canada.

Bonnie’s dad encouraged her often to tell his story. The thought of what he endured gave her nightmares especially when she was young. But years later, she did an intense amount of research with international travels to Poland and Germany. She combined her dad’s story from the war with her own career path and passion for food.

Many of the short chapters started with something to eat. Bonnie learned early how to cook from her grandma and dad. It’s impossible to read this book on an empty stomach as she described mouth-watering dishes as she explored cooking as a career.

There have been numerous books about the preparation of food but a first to have a memoir that includes this dark part of history. Her dad was a strong survivor and his story is important and educates all of us.

My thanks to Ballantine Books and NetGalley for providing me with an advanced copy of this book with an expected release date of January 21, 2025.

“How to Share an Egg” is a memoir by Bonny Reichert. Bonny’s father, a Holocaust survivor, features a lot in this book - but the bulk of his story is not told until the last 20% of this book. Most of the book focuses on Bonny - her love of food (though her father and family shared it too), her generational trauma (wonderfully expressed), and her life - though her father’s story is interwoven. I have really mixed feelings about this book, which is frustrating for me. I so wanted to enjoy this book more than I did as I knew Holocaust survivors and absolutely loved how Bonny expressed and told her father’s heartbreaking story. However, I found myself feeling a bit too bogged down in Bonny’s story - as I wanted to know more about her father’s tale, not how she was maturing and dealing with life, work, marriage, and kids. I liked how food was the tying together aspect of this book, but I felt like something was missing. Do I think this book was one to read - yes. Do I need to read it again - no. Would I recommend it to people - yes, but I’d caution that I found Bonny’s father’s life more gripping, to be honest. 3.25 stars overall, rounded up due to this being a debut novel.

Speechless, not sure anything I can put into words can capture the emotions I felt while reading this. The author weaves family, history, and food into a moving story around her father’s story of surviving the Holocaust. Dishes are detailed so well through the chapters in between moments of family relationships and the author’s personal growth.

“For us, the way that people cook and eat, how they set their tables, and the utensils they use all tell a story.”

This was a book about a woman who was very close to her father, a man who was a Holocaust survivor. He tried not to burden her too much with his Holocaust related stories while she was much younger, but as she grew into adulthood he gradually shared more as she hungered for this information. Ironically enough, it seemed like he was able to handle the horrors of his past much better having lived it, while his daughter was filled with much more anxiety the more information she pried from him.

Her father was very passionate about the cultural foods he remembered eating from the loving hands of his own mother, and would often describe them to his daughter. In turn, she also developed a passion for these foods, learning how to cook them from both her father and maternal grandmother. She eventually parlayed this into attending chef school. Her father had owned and operated restaurants, but did not want this overwhelming work intensive future for his daughter. In the end, she organically mixed her gift for writing with her culinary obsession and wrapped it around her father's story. I think this amalgam of ingredients she combined in this memoir made the process of telling his story much more palatable. I loved hearing about the foods she was making, even though for the most part I had never eaten any of them in my lifetime. She made it all sound so delicious!

The father's Holocaust experiences did not weigh down the book heavily- they were artfully interspersed throughout the book around the author's own life story and all the culinary interludes- and I learned a lot about this horrific slice of history in such a personal way that I had never really experienced before. Well-done.

Thank you to Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine who provided an advance reader copy via NetGalley.

I found the story an emotional journey through the eyes of the author, who experiences her important moments in life through food. The Food not only represented nourishment but also comfort for what she was experiences at the of her life.
I loved following the author as she describes her moments in life that connected her to the food and the people she cared for, both the good and the bad. I loved how much the author loved the food she cooked for herself and others and how she always tried to make a dish exactly the way others remember it, and would go out of her way to obtain that special ingredient. At times I could almost taste the food the author described and it sounded so yummy.
The most important part of the story that I can't get out of my head is the impact of being the daughter of a holocaust's survivor and how it shaped how she felt about herself and food and how she dealt with the actual memories of her father. At times, it was just heart wrenching as the author described what her father went through, but also how grateful her father was for everything that he had.
To me the story is about being grateful for every moment you have.

I want to thank Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine | Ballantine Books and NetGalley for an advance copy of a story about love and food.

Absolutely fascinating memoir about food, family, intergenerational conflicts and how the trauma of the Holocaust. never goes away. The writing was beautiful, poignant and heartfelt. I couldn't put it down. Highly recommended.

What a fabulous memoir. I was moved by many sections and really enjoyed the writing. The little details of the meals and food that most influenced her life were so fascinating. I loved her father cooking an egg and her time in Poland. Highly recommend.

This was such a moving book. As the daughter of a holocaust survivor I can relate to many of the stories she tells about her father. I also love how she weaves food into every aspect of his life. My father also talked about the food his mother cooked, before the concentration camps when food was plentiful. Having enough to eat was a priority in our household and every joyous occasion revolved around meals. I admit that has carried down to my life. The writing is wonderful and sharing her pain, anxiety and fears conveys the trauma she and her family endured.