Cover Image: The Taste of Longing

The Taste of Longing

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Member Reviews

It's an okay book, people who like reading history and biographies of ordinary people living larger than life lives will enjoy it.

Thanks to the publisher for the ARC.

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The Taste of Longing is the novelistic biography of the remarkable, enterprising Ethel Mulvany, a Canadian woman who spent years as a POW in Singapore’s infamous Changi Prison during WWII. ⁠

As the food rations became smaller, Ethel and other prisoners began playing games of make-believe in which they planned entire meals to the smallest detail. These games and memories of better times gave them hope, and while the food was unattainable at the time, the imagined feasts reminded them of home.⁠

Ethel eventually started writing down recipes from fellow prisoners, and years after getting back her freedom, she turned them into a POW Cookbook as a testament to their experiences.⁠

This biography is about Ethel, the woman, but it's also about how mental illnesses were often ignored and overlooked at the time. Ethel suffered from bipolar disorder, and naturally her mental state deteriorated as she navigated life in wartime and in prison. But even as she coped with her illness, Ethel found ways to improve the lives of everyone around her by organizing charities, helping Japanese immigrants reunite with their families, and donating most of what she had to the people who needed it the most.⁠

This isn't a light read, but Suzanne Evans still managed to turn it into an uplifting, if sad, story. It's a book about courage, resourcefulness, and resilience from a woman who fought for others until her last breath. It's also a story about the often-overlooked experiences of women during wartime, how they survived through their own means, and a testament to the ways in which food can bring people together - even when it's just imagined.⁠

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This is a biography of the amazing Ethel Mulvaney, who was thrown in a Japanese prison during World War II, and spent the time fantasizing with the other prisoners about the food they would eat when they were released. Ethel compiled a cookbook, and each chapter of her biography contains a recipe from that cookbook. The biography goes even deeper, though, and describes Ethel's struggles with mental illness.

I loved this story of a woman so tough that she survived the horrors of a Japanese prison. She was so forceful that she sold thousands of copies of her cookbook just through sheer will alone. She was so brave and resilient that she battled mental illness through her other struggles.

I highly recommend this fascinating biography.

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"However, it was not lost on any of them, even the little ones, that no matter how energized and colourful Aunt Ethel appeared, a strange sadness hung about her. Who but Ethel would sit among the trailing vines in the vegetable garden and eat every last sweet green pea yet never be able to fill the emptiness inside?"

The Taste of Longing tells the harrowing story of Canadian citizen Ethel Mulvany, who was living with her husband in Singapore, when in 1942 the Second World War breaks out in full. The Japanese take Mulvany and many other expats from many countries, as prisoners of war, and put them in Changi Prison.

There is not nearly enough food for everyone, and part of the POWs' mental survival is imagining the food they'll eat when they get out of Changi. Ethel starts collecting recipes from her fellow prisoners, and compiles a Changi cookbook.

But that's only the start of the story. Ethel suffers from bipolar disorder, which was hard enough to manage in the 1940s without the hardships of prison life. It also doesn't help that part of how Ethel handles her mental state is by keeping herself busy, which doesn't endear her to everyone.

"You’re walking as if in a shadow. There’s a shadow by you that is you [now], there’s a shadow by you that was you [before the war], there’s a shadow by you that was you in the prison. And you can’t quite endure, you’re kind of a triad. There you walk, in a nervous shock, a trauma of types. You know you want the other two to become you, but you can’t see them merging."

Suzanne Evans takes a novelistic approach to the story, and quotes regularly from many different diaries of prisoners, and illustrates each chapter with a recipe from the Changi cookbook. Even more interesting, I thought, was Ethel's story after the Second World War, how she gave meaning to her life.

It's a harrowing read, certainly but also very inspiring, how Ethel Mulvany didn't let the bastards grind her down, so to speak.

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The Taste of Longing
By Suzanne Evans

It is no secret that I am a sucker for a good book cover. The cover of this book was off-putting for me. It seemed to indicate a dry read. It is a beautiful rendering of the subject of this biography, Ethel Mulvany, but I think it would be more marketable if it were updated with a more interesting background while still remaining true to its subject.

Biography is not my favorite genre. The subject of this biography is different than others I have read before. This is why I asked NetGalley if they would allow me to read it.

The Taste of Longing is a story of a fascinating, vibrant woman whose life takes some unexpected turns. She ends up imprisoned and starving in Singapore. The group of women that suffer alongside one another battle physical and emotional surrender through sharing their recipes. Mulvany eventually publishes these recipes in honor of the women she once knew.

This book has recipes scattered throughout which adds an interesting layer to this biography. The Taste of Longing reads like a novel which makes it readable and enjoyable. Overall this book was well written and fascinating.

Thank you NetGalley and Between the Lines for a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

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The Taste of Longing by Suzanne Evans is a wonderful testimony of the human spirit’s ability to rise above one’s situation through creativity, imagination and the will to live.

This true story of Ethel Mulvany from Manitoulin Islands, is a fascinating record of a Canadian woman who sees the world thanks to her gutsy entrepreneurialism. She embraces cultures and customs with an ease that’s ahead of her time and context. Behind her indomitable energy, is a woman who also regularly deals with psychological breakdowns to the point where her husband leaves her just after she survives the Second World War as a prisoner of war with 500 other women at the Changi prison in Singapore.

What truly makes this book stand out is the prison experiences of Ethel and many others at Changi where they almost die of malnutrition. She and her companions overcome harsh physical realities by focusing on creating imaginary recipes of food that they will eat as hostess of parties once they are liberated. This ability to visualise a different reality, is similar to Viktor Frankl’s experiences in concentration camps in In Search of Meaning. By training one’s brain to focus on possibility amidst adversity, Ethel and her companions are great reminders of what it takes to stay sane in truly harsh conditions.

What I love about this book is its historical value of placing women at the heart of war experiences and demonstrating how they survived through their own means. These women used stitching, painting using human hair and clay or even singing as forms of protest against their captors.

Even more extraordinary is Ethel’s later life contribution when she supports a Japanese family to reunite in Canada although she feels some degree of hatred for them for the treatment she endured at Changi. She also promotes world cultures through handicraft that she sells around Canada, creating opportunities for weavers in India. She is inspiring.

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First sentence: Ethel pulled on the lumpy blue coat she’d been given by the Red Cross and glanced in the mirror before heading out to the printer’s. There was nothing she could do about the coat’s ugliness, but the garment was hers and not much else in the world was. Just over a year before, on an unforgettable September day in 1945 at the end of the war, she had been carried out of a Singapore prison camp on a stretcher. This five-foot-seven-inch woman had been unable to tip the scales past eighty-five pounds then, but now she was on her way back to her old size, if not her old self.

Premise/plot: The Taste of Longing is a biography of Ethel Mulvany. It covers Mulvany's life from 1933 until her death. In 1933, Mulvany met and married her husband--an English doctor then living in India. In the late 1930s, the two are working and serving in Singapore. Which is where these two are when war finds them. Soon they are separated and imprisoned. Mulvany has a unique story to tell of her time in captivity. She oversaw several projects 'for the Red Cross'.

But what this book mainly focuses on is the cookbook she created on two ledgers--provided by the Japanese--which she and the other women of the camp contributed to as they daydreamed about their favorite foods. Each chapter opens with a recipe giving the woman who contributed it to the cookbook when possible. The book concludes with impressions of the recipes. Each recipe had a taster, a man or woman who followed the recipe and tasted it.

But the book isn't only about the cook book or its publication--her determination to publish it and use all the profits to send care packages to recovering Prisoners of War. It is also about her life and her mental illness.

My thoughts: It would be wrong to say it is ever easy to suffer from mental illness. But there are times which it would be worse to live and try to get help and treatment. Mulvany suffered from mental illness at a time when it was misunderstood, misdiagnosed, and mistreated. First do no harm really wasn't the approach. I'd heard about electric shock therapy before, but I'd never heard about "treating" mental illnesses with insulin shots inducing comas! It sounds absolutely APPALLING and all kinds of wrong. Mulvany experienced these two treatments...in addition to others.

The book was fascinating in a bittersweet way. Evans shares the sources of her biography, and that really sheds a light on how mental illness was--and in some cases still is--perceived. Her fellow prisoners--most of them, though not all--really shunned and rejected her because of her mental health or lack thereof. She had supporters who loved her and loved seeing her frantic involvement to improve prison life. And she had enemies who really thought she was trouble with a capital T. But what I really found bittersweet was how her husband reacted to his wife's mental health. For better or worse wasn't the case.

I found it a compelling read yet profoundly sad in a way.

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