The book is cute and has a ton of novelty pie recipes in it if that is your thing. The essays about her life growing up were the strongest most cohesive parts of the book.

However big takeaway for me was how many references to beer and drinking there were. Nearly every story about a friend or a state involved beer and/or partying.

I’m not one to begrudge someone a drink but it really stood out! I did a search and she mentioned either beer generically or a specific beer over 50 times.

She kept saying she loved pie but honestly that never came across to me. She seemed to have gotten a pie cookbook in 2020 and then quit her job and went to work at the bakery that published it and made pies there? I don’t feel like she fleshed how that worked enough and honestly, she never seemed that interested in making pies. She sure has made a lot but she somehow doesn’t seem excited about it. Her true passion seems to be cheap beer and drinking. Which is fine but not what I was expecting from this “love letter” to pie.

The write ups about each state mostly seemed to be cribbed from Wikipedia with some (nice) info about the area pre-colonization and any personal connection she had to it no matter how tenuous.

The book sort of felt like she was trying to to write to a pitch or outline she never really thought through but now had to deliver on.

I felt that including sourcing suggestions would have been nice. Some of the ingredients were very regional. Was she able to get them all in NYC?

Maybe her next book should be about her love of beer? That seemed like something she could really talk about a lot and more cohesively than she could about pie.