The essays that fill out the collection, a grab bag of the autobiographical and polemical, are characteristically lively, though they highlight significant gaps in DeRuiter’s skill set ... DeRuiter has an 'all eyes on me' narrative persona — ravenous, pugnacious, irrational, loud. Unmodulated, her voice is ideal for delivering a rant, but it can overwhelm less flammable material ... She has discovered poignant personal tales and beguiling humanity there, hiding in plain sight in the maelstrom of the internet. But rather than exploring this tranquil space with delicacy and gentle wit, she swamps it with salty all-caps asides and sarcastic mini-diatribes
Delivers everything the book’s subtitle promises: mouthwatering descriptions of marvelous food (and one unforgettably horrific dining experience), stories that will evoke plenty of snorting and laughing out loud, and those that will prompt sympathetic seething over well-documented incidents of food service industry misogyny ... There should be lots of well-deserved publicity for this amiable collection that’s likely to appeal to a wide range of readers.
Memoirs are expected to be intimate, laying the groundwork for an author’s backstory and how they got to where they are currently. But it is less common for a personal account to be rendered in a way that’s hilarious, clever, profound and poignant at the same time, particularly one with food as its focus. Geraldine DeRuiter’s If You Can’t Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury provides all these elements and more ... DeRuiter’s divulging is comforting and significant to both women and those who have made a similar culinary journey. Readers will find this witty series of vignettes humorous and enlightening.
