I haven’t done a jello post in a long, long time.

To rectify that shameful failing, I bring you this [hat tip Ed Driscoll via Instapundit]:

Jell-O might be the glistening dish of picnics and potlucks, but for Allie Rowbottom—a descendant of the Jell-O fortune—it’s both a burden and an abyss. In Jell-O Girls, she weaves together her family history and the story of the classic American dessert to produce a book that alternately surprises and mesmerizes. Despite its title, this isn’t a bland tale that goes down easy; Jell-O Girls is dark and astringent, a cutting rebuke to its delicate, candy-colored namesake.

I feel the need to interrupt and say that the title “Jell-O Girls” doesn’t sound like “a bland tale that goes down easy” to me. It sounds like porn.

But it’s not:

Rowbottom’s great-great-great-uncle purchased the Jell-O business in 1899 for $450. He sold it 26 years later for $67 million, plenty of money to fund several generations of heirs.

Jell-O Girls could have easily devoted itself to the tragic fates of those heirs, or what the family called “the Jell-O curse.”

“The Jell-O curse.” Now it sounds like a Nancy Drew mystery.

Jell-O, meanwhile, gets the full semiotics treatment, as Rowbottom shows how it went from a modern, scientific foodstuff to a relic of soul-killing suburbia. As sharp as her insights often are, this is a book in which Everything Signifies. Even a digression about the catacombs in an Italian monastery includes some Jell-O symbolism. You occasionally want to tell Rowbottom to ease up: Sometimes a Jell-O mold is just a Jell-O mold.

“Soul-killing surburbia”? Maybe the reviewer should ease up, as well.

Here’s the book, which I have to say I probably won’t be reading.

And here are some jello molds that aren’t “just jello molds.”

By the way, “Jell-O” is the brand name, and “jello” is the generic.

[NOTE: This post was originally on my older blog and had comments, but unfortunately the comments didn’t transfer over here.]