by P.J. Tierney ; illustrated by Kitchen Ink Publishing ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 9, 2025
An exciting approach to cooking with kids—traveling the world while exploring the kitchen.
Awards & Accolades
Our Verdict
GET IT
A colorful, easy-to-use, educational cookbook for kids who want to whip up Italian cuisine.
This addition to Tierney’s Culinary Passport Series brings both history and culture to the kitchen, featuring 38 colorful Italian recipes organized into categories including Breakfast, Small Plates, Sides and Snacks, Entrées, and Desserts. From easy dishes such as Caprese Salad to more challenging fare like Italian Wedding Soup, there is something for everyone. Beautiful photos accompany each recipe, providing a visual reference for children to show what they are trying to create before they set out to make it. For kids who are especially picky about new foods (they only like soups, not salads, or they hate tomatoes), being able to see each dish will boost their confidence as they can quickly scan and point to a recipe they think looks good. It’s truly the details that make Tierney’s cookbook a go-to for children; the use of both Fahrenheit and Celsius, as well as imperial and metric measurements, allows kids from all over the world to easily grasp these recipes (instead of worrying about conversions, readers can focus on having fun in the kitchen). An introductory note from the author whet readers’ appetites with an engaging discussion of Italian food traditions (“Dinner in Italy is typically eaten around 8 pm, and a family dinner could be over in an hour or less. Dinner is usually lighter than lunch to ensure a good night’s sleep”), and the inclusion of several recipes (noted by page) shows young readers right away that they’re in for a treat. They’ll be connected to the country and culture from the beginning, and with the free culinary passport PDF included on an accompanying website, children will enjoy virtually journeying through Italy as they make their way through the recipes.
An exciting approach to cooking with kids—traveling the world while exploring the kitchen.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781943016273
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Kitchen Ink Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Share your opinion of this book
More by P.J. Tierney
BOOK REVIEW
by P.J. Tierney
by Chloe Sorvino ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 6, 2022
Convincing, often enraging, and no more optimistic than the facts call for.
A new exposé of the American meat industry.
Since Upton Sinclair’s 1906 bestseller, The Jungle, denunciations of the meat industry appear regularly, and they remain fully justified. A simple description of what happens when an animal enters a slaughterhouse will horrify most readers, and equally time-honored are journalists’ depictions of low-wage slaughterhouse work, which is gruesome, dangerous, and unhealthy. Sorvino, who runs the coverage of food, drink, and agriculture at Forbes, does not ignore these easy marks, but she aims higher, targeting multinational corporations, billionaires, global trade, climate change, soil destruction, and pollution. “Meat production has been a staple of the American economy, culture, and diet for generations,” she writes, “but industrial agriculture that values profits over people and the environment is careening toward a food-insecure future.” American farmers and meat processors benefit from government subsidies and tax breaks, but their profits are a result of their cruel, assembly-line efficiency in factory farms or titanic feedlots, where the animals consume hyperdense feed, chemicals, and antibiotics to boost their weight before slaughter. Research reveals strong evidence that processed food, including bacon, ham, hot dogs, and salami, can cause cancer. Readers will gnash their teeth at Sorvino’s vivid accounts of rapacious billionaires and the half-dozen mega-corporations that dominate the industry, pollute waterways, and exhaust farmland under the very gentle hand of government regulators. In the final section, the author explores a few solutions, but she is skeptical that alternative protein will ever upend traditional industrial systems. She describes a dozen entrepreneurs and their protein alternatives, but “meat alternatives accounted for 0.2 percent of 2020 grocery meat sales.” Money is rarely their main problem because this is a trendy field for venture capitalists (even the industry giants are researching this area), but investors nearly always value profit over saving the environment, and many of their products are far from organic, requiring industrial farmed inputs, chemicals, and pesticides.
Convincing, often enraging, and no more optimistic than the facts call for.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982172-04-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
Share your opinion of this book
by Kay Allison ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 10, 2023
A humorous and heartening approach to sobriety.
Awards & Accolades
Our Verdict
GET IT
A guide for women seeking to pursue their dreams without relying on alcohol.
Boulder, Colorado-based Allison is an entrepreneur, author, and business consultant who joined the Juicy AF alcohol-free community in 1999—“a community of like-minded, accomplished women supporting each other in living their best alcohol-free lives.” Since then, she’s aimed to help women in all stages of sobriety to halt the “drinking-remorse-drinking spiral” and embrace joyful futures. Her book effectively shows the hard-hitting and long-lasting impact of alcohol on the lives of people who can’t control their drinking—especially those of high-functioning, high-achieving women who believe that alcoholism mainly affects men. The book is organized into three parts, focusing on assessing one’s current relationship with alcohol, learning how to plan for alcohol-free life, and reimagining a new life from a spiritual standpoint. Allison offers revealing stories about her own struggles with binge-drinking and alcohol addiction as an outwardly successful woman who seemed to “have it all together.” She invites women to ask themselves if alcohol truly serves them, using interactive exercises, and then gives actionable advice for sticky situations, such as how to turn down drinks at stressful gatherings. The book’s latter half details how to apply spiritual laws to one’s life, so that the reinvented version of you has staying power. These laws include lessons on how to visualize one’s path, substitute behaviors, take direct action, practice forgiveness, and find community. Overall, this book is an excellent alcohol-awakening guide for women, including those readers who simply want to take stock of the role that alcohol is currently playing in their lives. The work is consistently positive, fun, and fast-paced, while also applying the pressure that many people need early in their sobriety journeys. It serves a demographic that’s long been underserved in the alcohol-free space, and brings a fresh, dynamic perspective.
A humorous and heartening approach to sobriety.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 135
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Share your opinion of this book
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.