Foreword Reviews published a recent national review of the memoir Frozen Dinners – a Memoir of a Fractured Family and provided new insight into the book.
“Illustrative prose brings the anecdotes to life, describing the Idaho landscape and muddy potato farms with poetic imagery.”
“…a heartbreaking memoir.”
“Elaine Ambrose’s tense memoir, Frozen Dinners … paints a complex portrait of a twentieth-century western family.”
The memoir is receiving 5-Star Reviews from online sites including Amazon Reviews and Goodreads. Here is one 5-Star Review:
Elaine Ambrose is a skilled humorist, but also a trained journalist, an essayist and experienced poet. I was eager to see how she would bring her voice to the complicated story of her family. The book is full of vivid descriptions of Idaho’s natural beauty, small-town family life, and the way that agriculture defines culture in towns and cities across our great nation.
The book has the precision of Elaine’s journalistic background mixed with the prose of a poet. It’s beautiful, but I think some readers may miss the artistry of this juxtaposition. If you allow yourself to fall into the story, you will be cheering on the Ambrose family, and shaking your head (or fist) as the story unfolds. Never one to back away from the difficult, Elaine lays bare the emotional and physical pain of her childhood as the only daughter of a wildly successful (and very frugal) businessman and his loving wife. The emotional chill of the home is matched by Elaine’s brisk prose, which relaxes into lush descriptions when Elaine-as-a-girl is alone and in nature while her brothers spend time with their father. Little Elaine grows up, and the story of the family’s fracture when the children become adults unfolds from there.
Read this for a glimpse into Idaho’s beautiful landscape, into lives well-lived, one family’s rise through smarts and grit and sweat and determination. Read it because it’s a great American story.”
The book is available in paperback and eBook format. Order from local bookstores or online.
