Jell-O Girls: A Family History

Jell-O Girls: A Family History by Allie Rowbottom    288 pages

"In 1899, Allie Rowbottom's great-great-great-uncle bought the patent to Jell-O from its inventor for $450. The sale would turn out to be one of the most profitable business deals in American history, and the generations that followed enjoyed immense privilege - but they were also haunted by suicides, cancer, alcoholism, and mysterious ailments."

That sounds like quite the family history, right?  That's what I thought . . . but I just didn't enjoy this book as much as I thought I would. I appreciated that the author's mother had done a lot of research and that the author delved into her family's history. However, there are a lot of parts that just felt like a lot of speculation to me. There's a lot of emotional detail in this book, where you're reading about what the author's grandmother thought, and her mother thought -- and I wondered where the author was getting all of that.  I found it more distracting than interesting at times.

This story is deeply personal, but it focuses so much on the many complaints of a wealthy and destructive family that it feels self-absorbed. The way that the author's mother blames so much on the "Jell-O curse" becomes repetitive, especially because it feels like there's no resolution. The author brings up medical issues in the family, as well as a strange bout of occurrences among girls that may or may not have some kind of link to Jell-O --- but there's no resolution.  From some of the reviews on Goodreads, and especially the one here, it appears there are some glaring errors in this book.  It's one thing if you want to write a memoir about your mother and grandmother and include things about family history, but it's another to tie a business or company in to problems in that family.

The one thing I did like was the author's inclusion of the history of Jell-O, as well as the way that the advertising changed throughout the years (and how it reflected views on women). For me, that was the most interesting part of the book. I finished this book out of curiosity, but didn't enjoy it and wouldn't recommend it.

American Ghost

American Ghost by Hannah Nordhaus
320 Pages

"The award-winning journalist and author of The Beekeeper's Lament attempts to uncover the truth about her great-great-grandmother, Julia--whose ghost is said to haunt an elegant hotel in Santa Fe--in this spellbinding exploration of myth, family history, and the American West. The dark-eyed woman in the long black gown was first seen in the 1970s, standing near a fireplace. She was sad and translucent, present and absent at once. Strange things began to happen in the Santa Fe hotel where she was seen. Gas fireplaces turned off and on without anyone touching a switch. Vases of flowers appeared in new locations. Glasses flew off shelves. And in one second-floor suite with a canopy bed and arched windows looking out to the mountains, guests reported alarming events: blankets ripped off while they slept, the room temperature plummeting, disembodied breathing, dancing balls of light. La Posada--"place of rest"--had been a grand Santa Fe home before it was converted to a hotel. The room with the canopy bed had belonged to Julia Schuster Staab, the wife of the home's original owner. She died in 1896, nearly a century before the hauntings were first reported. In American Ghost, Hannah Nordhaus traces the life, death, and unsettled afterlife of her great-great-grandmother Julia, from her childhood in Germany to her years in the American West with her Jewish merchant husband. American Ghost is a story of pioneer women and immigrants, ghost hunters and psychics, frontier fortitude and mental illness, imagination and lore. As she traces the strands of Julia's life, Nordhaus uncovers a larger tale of how a true-life story becomes a ghost story--and how difficult it can sometimes be to separate history and myth."

This isn't really a ghost story.  Instead I would label as a genealogical trek to the past as the author tries to flesh out family myths and assumptions.  The author also made several visits to various mediums and psychics which I felt weakened the book.