Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

REVIEW EDITED TO ADD THIS, a comment explaining my rating: Many of the recipes are riddled with issues, but the book itself is sort of cute, which is why I gave the book two stars instead of one. The author somehow manages to convey a sense of the aspirational with these VERY mediocre meals, and no matter how bad the food, I have to give her props for that neat trick.I really don't know how she does it. This book isn't 100% awful, as so many of the 1-star ratings would lead one to believe. It's nicely presented, and there are a few cute little pep talks that might motivate people to get dinner on the table for their families. If you're looking for something to inspire you to put more effort into menu planning, you might find a little inspiration here. Shay has a way of using her seemingly nice easy life to make her readers want to copy her so they can have what she has. The book features photos of her cute kids and fancy custom kitchen, along with little essays on the importance of family dinnertime. HOWEVER, if you're looking for good reliable TESTED recipes, DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK. I've been following Shay's blogs for a long time and have tried a number of her recipes when they were first published. As I said, Shay has a way of selling herself, of enthusiastically bragging on her recipes, where it piques your curiosity and you want to try them. But most of her dishes do not turn out very well. A few are downright inedible, with obvious errors in the amount of liquid and/or spices needed. Bless her heart, Shay refers to herself as a "foodie" when she obviously knows next to nothing about how flavors and ingredients interact. I was SO SURPRISED to see her same exact blog recipes presented in this book with no modifications to reflect all the feedback and questions Shay received from her readers. Here she'd gotten so many pointers from what were essentially unpaid taste testers (her willing audience who then left comments about what didn't work and needed to be fixed), but she ignored them and didn't even bother to correct the major problems she had to have known about! I'm surprised Harvest House got behind this project, frankly. It's obvious nobody at the company ever tried any of the recipes or bothered to read the comments and questions from Shay's readers. BOTTOM LINE: If you're looking for motivation, you might like this book, but if you're looking for recipes, save your money.