In Jell-O Girls, she weaves together her family history and the story of the classic American dessert to produce a book that alternately surprises and mesmerizes. Despite its title, this isn’t a bland tale that goes down easy; Jell-O Girls is dark and astringent, a cutting rebuke to its delicate, candy-colored namesake. It’s also the kind of project that could turn unwieldy and even unbearable in the wrong hands. But Rowbottom has the literary skills and the analytical cunning to pull it off. Like a novelist, she can imagine herself into the emotional lives of others, while connecting her story and theirs to a larger narrative of cultural upheaval ... Rowbottom traces all of this with a sure hand, drawing details from her mother’s unfinished memoir and shaping them so that they make sense in her own. Much of the writing is lush yet alert to specifics ... As sharp as her insights often are, this is a book in which Everything Signifies. Even a digression about the catacombs in an Italian monastery includes some Jell-O symbolism. You occasionally want to tell Rowbottom to ease up: Sometimes a Jell-O mold is just a Jell-O mold. The product history is mostly illuminating, though, as Rowbottom shows how the brand tried to keep up with the times ... Rowbottom’s book is too rich and too singular to reduce to a tidy argument.

Though the book begins inauspiciously with stock portraits and lengthy exposition at the expense of robust dialogue—a problem common in narratives that rely too heavily on received history rather than authorial imagination—it improves markedly as the story advances to the present day, gaining heat and aesthetic acuity until, by the end, analogies are often striking and the emotion of the denouement well-earned ... this is a capable, highly readable book on a topic that deserves more attention ... Though superwealth and misogyny are ready subjects, Jell-O Girls is most interesting as an examination of the psychological sources of illness and the outsize fertility of unhealed trauma, which inevitably begets more trauma, creating a lineage of what seems like cellular-borne pain ... Rowbottom touches only briefly on Freud and conversion disorders, and this is an opportunity lost for both reader and author ... Though Rowbottom’s memoir is an earnest and laudable attempt to return us and her to wholeness, most will need to go further to bridge that most masculinist invention—the psyche/soma split—to regain the space that, generation after generation, has been made into a battleground: the female mindbody.

With crystalline language and a novelist’s measured eye for story, Rowbottom explores Jell-O’s hold over her family, weaving together a history of the sugary treat: a family history full of alcoholism, mental illness, sexual abuse, and ill-fated choices, as well as a cultural history of the domestic-science movement ... In a lesser writer’s hands, this endeavor might have ended in a sloppy mess, but Rowbottom’s skill keeps all of her ingredients remarkably well-contained ... The idea of molding—as in how to shape the ideal salad and how to shape the ideal woman—is a strong theme throughout the book. Even before Mary’s late-night revelation while reading Adrienne Rich that the curse is actually the patriarchy, the reader can see the feminist lens informing the book ... Rowbottom gives patriarchy due diligence as a matter of course, but this is no strident, second-wave manifesto as it might have been if left in her mother’s hands. Jell-O Girls is too subtle for that ... Through careful research, Rowbottom reveals the company’s long history of exerting influence on the female body and role in society ... Jell-O Girls is hard to put down, effortlessly weaving together personal history, family history, cultural history, and more. Rowbottom presents her narrative with the clarity of an outsider, acting as a journalist would ... That Rowbottom could create a work of such beauty and meaning from her uneasy inheritance is truly an act of redemption.

With candid and unflinching descriptions connecting the history of Jell-O, feminism and her mother's unpublished writings, Rowbottom makes a case that the curse [of the Jell-O family] wasn't physical, emotional or confined exclusively to their family. (Pearle Wait, the original holder of the Jell-O patent, went bankrupt shortly after the sale.) Instead, the curse was a repressive societal attitude 'reflected by the messages about women and their worth that her family sold with each box of Jell-O' ... Jell-O Girls is a fascinating family history combined with an examination of an iconic brand, one with double-sided messages of domesticity and nurturing that have influenced generations of women. By sharing her family's most personal tragedies, Rowbottom shows the interconnectivity among women and the continued need for amplification of their voices.

In this compassionate, feminist-flavored memoir, Rowbottom both distances and broadens the family story by setting it in the context of the changes in the lives of American women over the past century, as reflected in the marketing and sales of Jell-O. First viewed as a sweet treat and later as a dietary aid, the dessert serves as an oddly apt reflection of women’s concurrent, ambivalent relationships to their appetites and bodies.

Jell-O heir Allie Rowbottom’s keening book is at its core an act of devotion to her mother, Mary ... What gives her text its emotional force is the interweaving of this material with her own personal stories and those of her mother ... Mary saw herself and the afflicted girls as equally victims of a patriarchal order that expected women to be as sweet and smooth as Jell-O ... These ideas seem a tad schematic at first, as does Rowbottom’s account of her grandmother Midge’s short life ... The narrative moves onto stronger ground with Mary’s youth ... What lingers most after reading Jell-O Girls, however, is Rowbottom’s moving portrait of abiding mother-daughter love.

There are devastating, disturbing and dark sequences here, often powerfully written and at other times weakened by repetition and disjointed phrasing. The author explores the idea that the patriarchal messages offered by Jell-O ads so bound women in the insular, conservative small town of Le Roy that it affected women negatively ... Readers who are interested in mother/daughter relationships and stories of addiction and recovery may be particularly interested ... But what is to be believed? Sweeping generalizations and inaccuracies make stories in this book questionable ... For me, the book never connected the dots enough to blame a variety of illnesses and cancers, covering a 60-year period, on the remembered history of a food product, its message and its town. Further, it is irresponsible of authors to make assessments of communities on short contact with them, either as journalists or as memoirists.

She successfully draws readers into the details of their lives, which are at turns both intriguing and mundane. As Jell-O sales continue to decline, this account illuminates the rise of both an American product and dynasty ... The renown of Jell-O will attract a variety of readers to this memoir, and the storytelling will keep them turning pages to the very end.

It is a dark, disturbing story of patriarchy, oppression and sickness, alternating with a meticulously researched feminist history of the Jell-O business and its marketing campaigns directed at women ... Ms. Rowbottom’s accounts of her illness are harrowing and hard to read.

The author also explores the medically inexplicable ailments that not only befell her mother, but also—as late as 2011—young girls living in LeRoy, New York, the birthplace of Jell-O. Rowbottom delivers a moving memoir of a daughter seeking to understand her mother, family, and the place of women in American society, and the narrative also serves as a thoughtful, up-close-and-personal feminist critique of a cultural icon. A book brimming with intelligence and compassion.

Throughout, Rowbottom asserts that a curse afflicted her family: 'The curse was patriarchy.' Though Rowbottom’s focus on the 'curse' sometimes distracts from the narrative, her memoir offers a fascinating feminist history of both a company and a family.