Reviews Praise "The Year of Soup" as "Highly Recommended and Thoroughly Entertaining"

NYACK, N.Y. - Nov. 3, 2014 - PRLog -- "The Year of Soup"
Howard Reiss
ISBN 978-0615725451
Softcover, 296 pgs
E-Book


A Woman Opens a Soup Restaurant in a Small New England College Town
Where Her Old Family Recipes Touch the Lives of Her Customers and Take Her on a Journey Back in Time

"The Year of Soup" is Howard Reiss' second novel inspired by the role soup has played in his life and its ability to help heal. It received the Silver Medal for Best Fiction in the North-East Region at the Independent Publisher Book Awards in 2013.

This is a story about Tess who at the age of 30 has had three jobs and three significant relationships with two men and one woman – each lasting three years. Drifting through life, confused about her sexuality, Tess decides to live a life of celibacy and to open up a restaurant devoted to soup. Tess has a talent for making soups with strong medicinal and spiritual qualities – something passed down from her great-great grandmother, a descendant of one of the Salem witches.

In the second week of the restaurant’s opening, an elderly professor of English, Roger Beanstock, comes in at closing time. Beany, haunted by his own past has lived a celibate life devoted to his work. He visits the restaurant every Thursday night for the next year to share soup and wine with Tess, which she calls the Year of Soup, before taking his life. Shortly after Beany’s death, Tess meets Jim at the restaurant, a furniture maker with his own reasons for keeping to himself. It is through a series of letters that Beany has left for Tess that she learns the truth about the Professor, is able to come to terms with her own sexuality and discover Jim’s tragic secret that will change both of their lives.

The characters ranging from the local police chief addicted to Tess’ New England clam chowder to the neighborhood hairdresser who considers herself the local matchmaker create a small town community that that is reminiscent of Our Town.  Readers will be caught up in the lives of the characters and the stories they bring to the restaurant.

Howard Reiss' first novel, "A Family Institution," published in 2011, was based on a true incident involving the discovery of an aunt he didn't know existed who spent most of her life in Pilgrim State Hospital. It treats the serious problems of the way the mentally ill were treated back in the 30s, 40s and 50s with a comic touch and has received positive reviews from many organizations, including Midwest Book Review and Indie Reader.

The Midwest Book Review calls Howard Reiss “an especially gifted storyteller with a knack for creating fully developed characters and original storylines that engage the readers complete attention from first page to last.”

Howard Reiss is a graduate of Dartmouth College and Columbia Law School. He won writing prizes at both institutions, but confined his creative energies for the first 25 years after graduation to designing greeting cards and writing songs for his wife and daughters. He helped found a soup kitchen in Nyack, New York where he lives and runs, and supports book publishers by buying more books than he can possibly find the time to read.