Kitchen Boy

I too was a former student of Mr. Phippen, (high school in Syracuse, NY)- and he was the best - as is this fun and funny book. I have the advantage that I can imagine his voice narrating as I read. I'm looking forward to his next!

What a pleasure to read the book this summer while I was vacationing on Mount Desert Island. I hurried back to the bookstore to get another book by Mr. Pippen- Cheap Gossip- and was promptly informed by the cashier that he had been her High School English teacher! The book is a very "easy read" with the dryest humor. I had a similar upbringing as young An-dy in the book- working in a hotels and restaurants on Cape Cod, clamming with the parents, eating tons of fish, and waiting on the tourist population. This is surely a book that I will re-read each summer!

After reading reviews of Sanford Phippen's latest in the Boston Globe, I was excited to read his novel about being summer help at the Frenchman's Bay Manor. My mom was a college classmate of Phippen, and knew him then and we both recently finished this book. As Mum said, it's hard to tell where the truth stops and the fiction starts. The girls at FBM were quite a riot, and the descriptions of the guests a real hoot. As a former Kitchen Girl in the Mount Desert area a generation later, I remember waiting on the same people! Well, maybe not exactly. This book was laugh-out-loud funny in some parts, and in others, too true to be comic. My only disappointment was the ending that just sort of faded out. The first three summers at the Manor are my favorite- Hattie reminds me of many people! It makes me want to go driving around Sorrento and Winter Harbor, looking for evidence of the 3R's Remedial School for Rich Boys, and what might be left of the Manor1