Monday, April 17, 2017

Book Review: Oink - A Food for Thought Mystery by J.L. Newton

Happy Release Day Tomorrow!  
April 18th!


Title:  Oink - A Food for Thought Mystery
Author:  J. L. Newton
Genre:  Literary Fiction, Humor, Satire
Publisher:  She Writes Press
Release Date:  April 18, 2017

About the Book:

Pigs, poisoned cornbread, a feminist network, and a university tainted by corporate values.
First in the Emily Addams Food for Thought Series.


One of the 18 funniest books to come out this spring. MediaBookBub.Com


Emily Addams, foodie professor of women’s studies at Arbor State—a land grant university in Northern California—finds herself an unlikely suspect in the poisoning of a man she barely knows: Professor Peter Elliott of Plant Biology, the hotshot developer of a new genetically modified corn.
How did her cornbread end up in his hand as he lay in the smelly muck of a pig’s pen?


As Emily and her colleagues try to identify who and what has poisoned Peter, they also struggle to keep a new and corporate-minded administration from defunding the women’s and ethnic studies programs.
In the process of solving the mystery, Emily and her network deepen their ties to each other—and uncover some of the dark secrets of a university whose traditionally communal values are being polluted by a wave of profit-fueled ideals.
Oink comes with recipes.
“It has been said that the comic campus novel is no more (things in higher education are verging on the tragic), but Oink proves otherwise.”

—Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber, authors of The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy

Buy Links: Amazon 

My Review:

Emily Addams is a professor of women's studies at Arbor State University, caught up in college administration politics and trying to keep her department alive and not swallowed up into another department.  In the middle of all of that, a plant biology professor is found unconcious (poisoned) in the hog barn after eating a piece of corn bread, presumably baked by Emily.

There is a lot going on in this book, much of which I had a hard time following.  Perhaps readers who are more into college administration would have had an easier time with it.  A great deal of the happenings revolved around food, and the author supplied recipes throughout the book.  Quite frankly, those recipes looked pretty good!

There was some humor, some mystery, some debating about genetically modified foods, and so much more.

*Disclosure:  An advance reader copy was provided by the author in exchange for an honest review.  All thoughts, opinions and ratings are my own.

My Rating:


About the Author:

Judith Newton is Professor Emerita in Women and Gender Studies at U.C. Davis. While at U.C. Davis she directed the Women and Gender Studies program for eight years and the Consortium for Women and Research for four.



Her memoir, Tasting Home: Coming of Age in the Kitchen, is now available for pre-order and is forthcoming with She Writes Press on March 1, 2013.


Newton is also the author and co-editor of five works of non fiction on nineteenth-century British women writers, feminist criticism, women's history, and men's movements. Four of these works were reprinted by Routledge and the University of Michigan Press in the fall of 2012.

Her most current work has appeared in The Huffingon Post(February 8, 2013), The Redwood Coast Review (Winter 2012), poetalk (Summer, 2011), at http://tasting-home.com, and at http://ipinionsyndicate.com In 2011 and 2012 six chapters of her memoir won contests sponsored by women's memoir.com. She is currently at work on a feminist mystery and lives in the East Bay of California where she tends her garden and cooks for family and friends.

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