The recipes, as they were described, seem simple and like food that I would actually eat. I’m a big fan of hidden storage spaces and nostalgic furniture pieces. I especially liked the chapter about southern decorating. I envied her gushing about the warm weather, excessive decorating for holidays, and hosting parties with a signature southern style.

Plus, being from the mid-Atlantic, I liked to hear about life down south. But sometimes you just need a breezy read to cleanse your pallet from all of the memoirs about horrible childhoods and novels about dying people. Nothing wrong with that, even if it is lacking some substance. So, Witherspoon focuses on the positives, highlighting what makes it great to her personally. The book itself is a love letter to the south. She paints a very idyllic and biased portrait of the south which I appreciate as someone who loves my hometown. The book is a bit autobiographical, detailing Witherspoon’s childhood as it relates to her past and current relationship to her southern hometown. Maybe the next time I’m at the bookstore, I’ll thumb through a hard copy for the photos. It comes with a PDF of all of the recipes which I should have looked at to get a better sense of the book’s true content. The audio book is only about three hours long.

Being written by a celebrity, Witherspoon herself, of course, reads this book. I also like how it’s usually celebrities who read these audio books. So, I can usually get through a 12-disc book within the three week library borrowing period (without renewing). I still call them books on tape, and I spend about an hour each day in my car. An audio cookbookĪbout one-fourth of the books that I read in a year are audio books. Here is my review of Whiskey in a Teacup. And maybe she had something interesting to say about her life in between the recipes. After all, I like Reese Witherspoon as a celebrity, and I love celebrity memoir. But since it was there, I decided to pick it up. I was under the impression that it was just a traditional cookbook. I was a little confused when I saw the book on tape at the library. Why did I pick a cookbook as my first read of the year? Curiosity, I guess. The first book I read in 2019 was Reese Witherspoon’s cookbook/southern living guide, Whiskey in a Teacup.

Whiskey in a teacup book review