What readers think of Cover The Butter, plus links to write your own review.

While I found the story to be amusing and entertaining yet at the same time I felt sad for Katie's disheartening life events, I was expecting a story more along the lines of "Peggy Sue Got Married" or "A Christmas Carol".

I did not connect with what exactly caused her to slip back in time. There was no obvious event or trigger that I was able to interpret as falling back in time and then reappearing to the present, as in Wizard of Oz and so many other destiny-changing stories.

I found it delightful, nonetheless, but would like to know if I missed an obvious "something".

Our book club recently read this book:
Cover the Butter is a story about relationships and honesty with not only one's self but each other. Maybe not so much honesty, but confronting the issues and problems at hand instead of sticking one's head in the sand or "covering the butter". The club had mixed reviews, but overall it was an enjoyable read. There was little analyzing over the book itself, but many discussions were sparked regarding mother/daughter relationships, women's roles in the 60's - 70's, honesty between friends (do you tell them when they are making a mistake?). All agreed it was refreshing to see the main character strengthen throughout the book and be true to herself.

What sets this book apart from much of the "chick lit" genre is that it describes in detail the abuse suffered by a girl at the hands of her mother, and shows how this abuse affected the choices she made as a young woman. I do feel this book would be a good choice for a book group looking for an easy read about a not-so-easy subject. It could lead into a serious discussion of mother-daughter relationships: the messages we got from our mothers and the messages we give our daughters.

This is a novel dealing with a difficult subject - abuse. To make the reader aware of how, when and why this starts, the author uses a diary format to record the events.

The abuse begins as a child while living with an obsessively controlling mother and a weak-willed father.

After some rude awakenings with boyfriends, Kate marries Rodney and finds that he has already planned her life to be a full-time parent, a cook who will prepare his meals so that he can participate in athletic events and a Saturday night sexual partner who will satisfy his fetishes and fantasies. In short, he plans to be a married man who continues to live like a bachelor. Kate, in turn, dotes on her son, becomes a house mouse with all her scrubbing and cleaning and cooking. Her other passion becomes "building a house twig by twig, papering and painting walls, filling rooms with quilts, curtains, covers, wicker baskets, as well as furniture which she sanded, scraped and painted.

Three hundred pages of short sentences, in the form of repetitive conversations and the monotonous activities in Kate's life make the book boring and very depressing.

In the last chapter, we find that Kate has sanded, scraped and painted fifteen chairs (twenty-one more to go), and she is thinking about jams and cakes to make. I asked myself, 'are "we" really on a new route, or is this the same old circle?'

While the title is clever, the book itself is for a very limited audience.

Kate's mother always reminded her husband to cover the butter before lighting his post-supper cigarette. Kate--like so many women of her time--took this advice to heart and covered her personality to be the person others expected her to be. I cheered when she finally decided to take charge of her own life and began the process of divorcing her husband.

A great summer read that kept me up until 4:30 a.m. the night I read it.

A quick and easy read - good for book clubs just getting started and for those who need a break from heavier reading material. Cover the Butter is believable ... a little predictable ... and touches on many topics that are common among women. How much do we please others at the expense of self? How do we dig out what is buried in order to live our lives?

An enjoyable "summer read". As I read Carrie Kabak's words, it gave me a "peek" into a someone else's lifestyle, a family that is real. It is enjoyable to travel back through a family's "history" and see how they arrive at today.

This a book about family. But it's the friends of Kate who actually
save her throughout the novel. Author Carrie Kabak tells a story of a dysfunctional family so well that the reader feels a part of the story. By the end of the book I wanted the main character to scream at her "unproductive life" coaches: "You are not allowed to talk to me that way!" The characters are well developed but not many of them are likeable. For me the grandparents from Wales gave me hope that something sooner or later would work for Kate. I think many of the things that happened to Kate may have happened to all of us at one time or another. Just like when I look in a full length mirror I always stand up a little straighter thanks to ongoing motherly comannd of "stand up straight".