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The Year the Swallows Came Early by Kathryn Fitzmaurice is a very sweet debut novel.   Eleven-year-old Eleanor Robinson, better known as Groovy, loves to cook.  Her perfect day consists of creating the perfect menu with the perfect food.  Certain foods for certain moods.  Even at eleven Groovy knows what she wants most out of her life and that’s to go to cooking school.

To give you an idea of how much food plays into Groovy’s life, I thought I would share some of the really fun chapter titles with you:

• Five-Star Chocolate-Covered Strawberries
• Tortillas in Cellophane Wrape
• Saltines and Liquid Tylenol
• Burned Tuna Melts
• Not Sloppy Joes with Sweet Onions
• Cinnamon Churro but No Root Beer
• A Nice Tuna Fish Casserole with Peas
• Spaghetti out of a Jar
• Scrambled Eggs

What I love about these chapter titles is that each food obviously corresponds with a certain story in the book.  It’s been a few weeks since I read the book, but I can picture what was happening in each of these chapters.

The book begins on this line:

We lived in a perfect stucco house, just off the sparkly Pacific, with a lime tree in the backyard and pink and yellow roses gone wild around a picket fence.  But that wasn’t enough to keep by daddy from going to jail the year I turned eleven.

The day that Groovy’s father is arrested, her mother’s horoscope says Expect the unexpected.  Because Groovy’s mother relies so heavily on her horoscope, what else could she do after that?   As a result, while Groovy and her father are coming out of their small town local store, an officer stops them arrests her father and tells Groovy to run on home.  Groovy’s mother is tight lipped about the whole thing and won’t say a word.  She locks herself in the bedroom and won’t come out.  This is when I began to really feel for Groovy.  What mother in her right mind would treat her child that way, especially when she’s scared and confused?  Eventually, she reveals that she had her father arrested because he gambled away Groovy’s inheritance, the money that she would have used to go to cooking school.  And to top it off, she has him arrested in front of Groovy.  And then to top that off even more, she tells Groovy that she’ll needs to help earn the money back by selling chocolate covered strawberries at the local store down by the bay.  At this point, I am feeling all kinds of sympathy for Groovy and all kinds of let down for her mother.

Kathryn Fitzmaurice develops these characters so well and so early that I just had to see where this story was going to go.  In addition to Groovy and her parents, we meet other wonderful characters who each have a story of their own, including her best friend Frankie and the mother who abandoned him; Luis, Frankie’s older step brother who took him in and runs the local store; Marisol and her younger brother Frankie who always seem to be around, the first Eleanor Robinson, Groovy’s dead grandmother who left her with special treasure; and Tom, the homeless man who Groovy comes to feel a special connection with.

Groovy learns of loss, betrayal, love, and forgiveness and what is needed to bring a broken family back together again, albeit still a little broken.

This is one of my favorite passages from The Year the Swallows Came Early:

As I lay in bed that night, I started a new page in my cooking notebook.  I made a list of foods that reminded me of things.  I decided that it was one thing to come up with the perfect menus for situations, but also that certain foods could end up reminding people of things. Because from now on, scrambed eggs would always remind me of tonight, when Mama and I sat in lawn chairs in the fog, and I told her the whole story.

Like when people say, “Oh, this corn on the cob reminds me of the time we barbecued at Uncle Joe’s last summer.”  That sort of thing.  Or like that test doctors do where they say a word, and you’re supposed to say the first thing that comes to mind.  Dog, cat.  Night, day.  Scrambled eggs, talking.

My list:

scrambled eggs = talking to Mama in the fog
chocolate-covered coconut candy = our house
one of Luis’s tacos = the swallows coming back
white chocolate = Marisol

Looking it over, I realized everyone’s list would be different depending upon their own memories.

I entitled it:  Foodology.

Half the word coming from food, of course, and half coming from astrology.  I decided that if you could look it up in the dictionary, it would say: (noun) the study of food; the way certain foods remind people of things.

I knew if there were such a word, I would be an expert in foodology.

Kathryn Fitzmaurice will be an author to keep your eye on.  She’s off to a great start and I enjoyed the time that I spent with Groovy.  Visit Kathryn’s website and blog.

Stay tuned! Kathryn has an awesome interview here tomorrow!  And remember those awesome author recipes?  This is the perfect type of book for that!  The Year the Swallows Came Early is also on tour today with Kidz Book Buzz at A Christian Worldview of Fiction, All About Children’s Books, Becky’s Book Reviews, Booking Mama, Cafe of Dreams, Dolce Bellezza, Fireside Musings, Homeschool Buzz, Hyperbole, KidzBookBuzz.com, Looking Glass Reviews, Maw Books Blog, Never Jam Today, Novel Teen, Reading is My Superpower.

So, do you have a certain food that reminds you of a certain something?  Let’s hear them!

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