I have only one quibble-I now know more, much more, about clams than I ever wanted to.

Life on an island in the 1940’s with war restrictions and lack of services had to be difficult but Betty took it as an adventure, the best way to look life in the eye and thumb your nose at it. I hooted at the passages dealing with her daughters’ adolescence and her tale of picking peaches for a few dollars a day left me smiling but full of admiration for this woman who was always willing to do whatever needed doing. We seem to think that “snark” is a modern invention but this author mastered that kind of funniness all those years ago and we’re the better for it. MacDonald didn’t write a lot of books before she died of cancer in her late 40’s but those few are masterpieces of humor.

Among my favorites are Anne and Joan, Betty’s teenaged daughters, and the woman whose name I don’t recall that managed the peach farm. It wasn’t long at all before Heather Henderson became Betty MacDonald to my ear and I came to really appreciate her narration and, most of all, her ability to create individual voices for the many characters. Oddly, as long ago as that was, it’s Claudette Colbert’s voice I remember so that caused me a bit of a problem when I started listening to this audio book. Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray were delightful and I still have very fond memories of that movie today.

As it happens, the only person in that movie that’s in Onions in the Stew is Betty MacDonald the children weren’t born yet and Betty was with her first husband rather than the fella in this book. Now all they had to do was learn to cope with island life.īack in the Dark Ages when I was young, probably about 15, I saw an old movie called “The Egg and I” and fell in love with the story and the characters. They turned to the small islands within commuting distance, but tours of these islands turned up little available housing, at least of the suitable variety, until they found the perfect house on Vashon. The war created nearly insoluble housing problems in Seattle, so when Betty MacDonald remarried during it, she and her new husband, Don, were unable to find anything suitable.

Onions in the stew by betty macdonald