Book review: My Drunk Kitchen: A Guide to Eating, Drinking, and Going with your Gut by Hannah Hart.

One day, lonely cubicle dweller and otherwise bored New York City transplant Hannah Hart decided to make a fake cooking show for a friend back home in California. She opened her laptop, pulled out some bread and cheese, and then, as one does, started drinking. The video was called "Butter Yo Sh*t" and online sensation My Drunk Kitchen was born.

My Drunk Kitchen (the book!) includes recipes, stories, colour photographs, and tips and tricks to inspire your own adventures in tipsy cooking.
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I feel like I should start this off by saying straight out that this is not really a cookbook. I understand why it's being marketed that way but I do worry that some people who aren't familiar with Hannah and her youtube series also titled My Drunk Kitchen might buy this book expecting some actual recipes they could replicate at home and come away a little disappointed.

This is not to say that I don't think this is a good book (or that there aren't at least a couple of recipes in here that I see myself trying to recreate in the future. Saltine nachos, anyone?). I think this is a great book. Hannah Hart's typical humour is present in abundance and fans of her youtube videos will not be disappointed. My Drunk Kitchen is like a big sister giving you advice not just on cooking but more importantly on life in general. Hart is, as usual, incredibly funny, infectiously optimistic, and unfailingly honest, in the best way possible. The book does take the form of a cookbook, which I think is very clever, with each pun-tastically named recipe containing a life lesson or piece of advice, much like the standard format of the My Drunk Kitchen videos themselves.

My Drunk Kitchen is full of advice from the Hart (I had to) and honestly, I'm gonna go ahead and suggest that it might just be impossible to read this book and not feel more positive about life afterwards.

Fans of Hannah will definitely enjoy this book but if you've never seen her videos then it might leave you a little confused. Luckily, you can fix that right now.

4/5 stars.

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Book review: The Isobel Journal by Isobel Harrop.

The Isobel Journal is no ordinary snapshot of a contemporary teenage life. A charming and vivid narrative scrapbook of the eighteen-year-old author's sketches, mini-graphic novels, photography and captions, it captures her wit, her observations and her creative talent as she takes us through the three central themes in her life: 'Love', 'Friends, Art and Otters' and 'Me'.
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The Isobel Journal is sort of a graphic novel, except not really. There are illustrations and photographs, beautiful drawings and funny captions, and there is no story line or anything that really resembles a plot.

What The Isobel Journal is, really, is exactly that. It is a journal. It is Isobel Harrop's journal, to be precise. This means that there is no solid narrative and very little structure but what is here in abundance is Harrop's wonderful drawing style and wit. Her drawings are charming and a little quirky and very much the style of a teenage girl drawing in her sketchbook. They remind me a lot of the drawings my artist friends would make in their sketchbooks when we were teenagers, in fact. Some of the illustrations are very personal and others less so but they are all lovely and they all give the reader a view into the life of this teenage girl.

I love stripes!

Above is an example of a spread from The Isobel Journal. Harrop also uses photographs and snippets of text in some of her illustrations (and one of those snippets of text won me a nice stack of books from Hot Key last month. More on that in another post!) and these techniques work together to create a real scrapbook feeling. The book is split into three sections. The first section 'Me' is Harrop introducing herself to the reader, the second 'Friends, Art and Otters' delves a little deeper into Harrop's life and interests, and the third section 'Love' almost has a narrative and is certainly the most emotionally personal of the three sections.

There may not be a clear plot to this book but Harrop's illustrations do tell a story. They tell the story of Harrop's teenage years and they do so in a way that makes this book both beautiful and relatable. I read the whole thing in less than an hour but I know that I will go back to it again and again.

4/5 stars.

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Book review: Is It Just Me? by Miranda Hart.

Well hello to you dear book browser. So, here's the thing: is it just me or does anyone else find that adulthood offers no refuge from the unexpected horrors, peculiar lack of physical coordination and sometimes unexplained nudity that accompanied childhood and adolescence? I am proud to say I have a wealth of awkward experiences and here I offer my 18-year-old self (and you too dear reader) some much needed caution and guidance. Let's call it, because it's fun, a Miran-ual. I thank you.
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I'm a big fan of Miranda Hart's sitcom Miranda and I may have been told by one or two people that there are some similarities between myself and her onscreen persona (I'm not sure if I'm supposed to take that as a compliment but I will anyway) so I was, of course, anticipating that I would love this book.

Hart's 'Miran-ual' covers the basics of adulthood from jobs to pets to love and everything in between. The book is written in typical Miranda style and so it feels almost as though the reader is in conversation with the author, as though she is telling you all of these anecdotes face to face. If you enjoy the humour of Miranda then I'm sure you'll enjoy Is It Just Me? because it has that same jokey, personal style and plenty of stories from Hart's life that wouldn't be out of place in her sitcom.

Throughout the book Hart has conversations about her past and future with her 18 year old self, which at times I felt worked wonderfully but at other times felt a little bit like too much of a deviation from the more interesting stuff. When they did work though these conversations were endearing and funny, just like the rest of the book.

Although I perhaps didn't laugh out loud as often as I had been led to believe I might, I did thoroughly enjoy Is It Just Me? and I would highly recommend it to fans of Miranda Hart or Miranda. Is It Just Me? may not have the tell-all quality that people sometimes expect from celebrity memoirs but it is funny, honest, and everything you would expect from Miranda Hart.

4/5 stars.

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Book review: Love, Nina: Despatches from Family Life by Nina Stibbe.

In 1982 Nina Stibbe, a twenty-year-old from Leicester, moved to London to work as a nanny for a very particular family. It was a perfect match: Nina had no idea how to cook, look after children, or who the weirdos who called round were. And the family, busy discussing how to swear in German or the merits (or otherwise) of turkey mince, were delighted by her lack of skills.

Love, Nina is the collection of letters she wrote home gloriously describing her 'domestic' life, the unpredictable houseguests and the cat everyone loved to hate.
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I want to read more non-fiction this year and after everything I'd read about Love, Nina I knew it would be the perfect book to start with. And I was right.

Nina Stibbe's letters from her time as a nanny are full of amusing stories about her life as part of the literary-minded household where she cared for two wildly funny young boys. The boys are responsible for most of my favourite stories and conversations, closely followed by the playwright Alan Bennet, who features rather frequently as he lived in the same street and used to pop round for tea most nights.

I've read online that Bennet is not too pleased with the way he's remembered in Stibbe's book but honestly, I think there are far worse ways to be remembered. There is a layer of fondness over every memory mentioned in the book and the people even more so. Stibbe's letters are so funny and endearing it almost makes me want to become a nanny myself. But only if the family were as funny and as lenient with the cleaning as the one Stibbe worked for. It's clear from these letters that Stibbe loved her job and the people she worked for, and that they loved her too.

I honestly don't think there's anything I can say about this book that hasn't already been said dozens of times, but it's an extremely enjoyable read and even if it doesn't make you laugh out loud it's sure to make you smile.

5/5 stars.

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