Today's Imprint Read: Charlotte au Chocolat by Charlotte Silver

What would it be like to have grown up in a restaurant? Every night you put on your pretty dress, sit down at your special table, sip your Shirley Temple, and anticipate being served by an ever-changing wait staff. Meanwhile your parents are in the kitchen cooking for hundreds.

I grew up rich. The setting—or stage set—of my childhood was the velvety pink-and-green dining room of my mother's restaurant, Upstairs at the Pudding, located above the Hasty Pudding Club in a red-brick Victorian building at 10 Holyoke Street in Harvard Square. My life was not a child's life of jungle gyms and Velcro sneakers, but of soft lighting, stiff petticoats, rolling pins smothered in flour, and candied violets in wax paper. It was a life of manners, of air kisses, of "How do you dos," and a life for which I needed six party dresses a year, three every spring and three every winter. We were rich. Everybody knew it.

Yet we were not; we were not rich at all. For as long as I could remember, the restaurant had tottered on the brink of collapse. I always knew we would lose it one day. And we did lose it; we did. (p. 1)

—Charlotte au Chocolat: Memories of a Restaurant Girlhood, by Charlotte Silver (Riverhead Books 2012; quote is from uncorrected proofs)

Quick Facts

• Setting: Cambridge, Mass., and environs
  
• Characters: Charlotte Silver, her family, and assorted waiters and kitchen staff; the rich and famous make cameos
• Main theme: Loving tribute to her mother and the sacrifices she made to keep restaurant and family running
  
• Other themes: Food and drink, family, manners, times gone by
  
• Genre: Memoir

Want to Know More? For a fun annotated menu from Charlotte's childhood, check out the publisher's website. For more on author Charlotte Silver, read her interview with the Boston Globe. For more on Charlotte au Chocolat, including events and news, visit the memoir's Facebook page and watch the fantastic book trailer (below). For more Riverhead Books and for news about events and great books, like them on Facebook and follow them on Twitter.

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