Great tips! ( )

Excellent source for the many uses of baking soda.More than you woudl realize! ( )

Well worth owning! I love this book. ( )

Well worth owning! I love this book. ( )

Really not that good. A very large proportion of the ‘Over 500 Uses’ mentioned are essentially the same thing. So rather than suggesting you use a paste of baking soda and water as a mild abrasive to clean your bath, sink, or oven, she lists each use as a separate tip. Likewise the way that ‘sprinkle baking soda inside your shoes to combat foot odour’ is listed in three separate hints on one page (as well as again in quite a few other locations – slightly different wording each time, but it’s the same hint in each instance). And don’t get me started on how many times she recycles ‘store an open or perforated-topped box of baking soda in location X to remove unpleasant odours’.

She also has a bit of an obsession with banishing food smells – fish, poultry, wild game, cauliflower, turnips and beans are all apparently too smelly for her when cooking, so adding baking soda is her answer. (Fair enough, if the smells really bother her. But it strikes me as some serious overkill, and doesn’t exactly encourage me to try her other food-related tips. I like flavour!)

And finally there is the matter of the little disclaimers. To be fair, she does state early on that she has not personally tried ever one of these tricks herself. But why not? Comments like ‘are said to’, ‘many feel’, and ‘may’ don’t exactly inspire confidence in the courses of action she’s proposing, and make the book feel poorly planned and researched.

There are some good tips in here, but only two or three that I didn’t already know from other sources, (and quite a few she hasn’t even mentioned). I’m not surprised it sells well – people want to know how to stretch their money ever further, and most of us are distrustful of the chemical cocktails in many commercial products. But even allowing for the fact that this book is theoretically limited to the uses of one substance, it manages to be both padded and also lightweight. (Great for a winter jacket; lousy for a book of hints.) Jackie French and Shannon Lush are both better sources of information on this sort of thing. ( )