Date of Review:

11/03/2008

Published Work:

Harlot's Sauce: A Memoir of Food, Family, Love, Loss, and Greece

Reviewer:

Beth Ashley

Source:

Marin Independent Journal

Review Excerpt:

Patricia Volonakis Davis of San Anselmo serves up a delicious version of a famous Mediterranean dish in her first book, "Harlot's Sauce," the story of her seven years in Athens in a doomed marriage to a Greek-American husband.

Harlot's sauce is another name for salsa puttanesca, which Neapolitan prostitutes invented as a quick and cheap refresher meal between clients -"making something sweet from limited choices" - which Davis says is the theme of her book.

Her life in Greece - she accompanied her husband there in hopes it would salvage their marriage - was not always to her liking, but from it she discovered her true self and the strength for a life of her own. "I thought it would help him. It turns out it helped me."

Now, at age 52, she edits an online magazine and radio podcast at www.harlotssauce.com, and lives in Sleepy Hollow with her second husband, day trader Peter Davis.

Though her book deals with xenophobia - fear of things foreign - a collapsing marriage and women's empowerment, she purposely wrote in a humorous vein. One reader wrote "This is really terrible, but it's very funny."

Reese Lakota, events coordinator at Book Passage in Corta Madera, says the book is "like drinking a glass of wine and having a good conversation. I enjoyed it completely."

Link to Full Review:

http://www.marinij.com/lifestyles/ci_10892728