Food! Glorious FOOD!

In High School, I became enamored with the soundtrack from Oliver! (Singing softly, "Whe-e-ere is LOVE? Does if fall from stars above? Will I ever know that sweet hello...? etc.) Of course, my favorite song to belt along with was "FOOD! Glorious Food!"

Why not? We need food. Some food tastes heavenly. Creating deliciousness from not necessarily delicious ingredients is clever, challenging and fun.

Authors know this and they add food elements to their books for kids. I just re-read "Listen, Slowly" by Thanhhà Lai and the foods of Viet Nam are touted on almost every single page.

The books that allow their characters to bake, cook, fry, broil their own recipes are especially engaging. (Hot book review word alert - 'engaging'.)

Pie in the Sky by Remy Lai   After Jingwen's and Yanghao's father dies, their mother moves them to an English-speaking country. (I think it's Australia but it may be New Zealand.) Yanghao, being younger, makes headway in learning English by Jingwen has a lot of trouble. He is angry that his mother "left" their father behind and followed through on the family's plans to move and open a special bakery.  Jingwen decides that he has to bake every single one of his father's cakes to make things better for his family. BUT his mother, who must work, has forbidden the use of the oven. And Jingwen speaks so little English that he bribes Yangwao to help him.

I can't remember recipes in this book but the descriptions of the baking process, the ingredients, the temperature, the sneakiness make a recipe of sadness. The cakes sound delicious. The memories are bittersweet.

Roll With It by Jamie Sumner.  Ellie's CP and wheelchair don't keep her from trying to win baking competitions. After she and her mother move in with her grandfather to help watch over him, she is suddenly the only disabled kid and the new kid in a small public school. It does not help that she lives in a trailer park - hey! I lived in a trailer park for awhile. Stop with the judging! - across town. Her new neighborhood nets her a real friend with a can-do attitude.

Once again, no actual recipes that I remember. Where are the recipes?

 

The Doughnut King (The Doughnut Fix #2) by Jessie Janowitz.  Well, I never read the first book so I don't know how Tris's family moved from NYC to the nowhere town of Petersville, BUT in this book, Tris already has a doughnut stand selling the most delicious chocolate cream doughnuts ever. Problems abound. As people move out of Petersville, he has trouble creating demand. When he solves that problem, he can't keep up with demand. A spot on a cutthroat kids' cooking show creates even MORE demand. 

I want a doughnut, now. 

I probably mentioned THIS book back in 2017 when I read it. The Apple Tart of Hope by Sarah Moore Fitzgerald wins the Best Food-Related Title to Date.  Oscar has gone missing. His bike is found at sea. Everyone, but Meg, assumes that this is an accidental death or a suicide.  Meg doesn't believe Oscar is dead at all. But, she has been away for several months. Maybe something happened to Oscar to make him depressed enough. No! Meg can't believe that the baker of the best apple tart in the world is dead.  

NO RECIPE!! So disappointed!

Blast from the past! Touch-Luck Karen by Johanna Hurwitz is an entry in Hurwitz's Sossi family series. Karen, 13, would rather baby-sit or cook than do schoolwork. Her grades are so bad that her parents refuse to let her continue babysitting.  She MUST bring her science grades up by doing a project.  Karen uses her other enthusiasm to demonstrate chemical reactions. Cooking to the rescue.

This book was published in 1982 and I read it during the next decade. I remembered that science demonstration and LOVED it and remembered it all these years. Was there a recipe? Now THAT, I can't remember.

 

Listen!

   I rarely - if ever - email authors.  Today, I emailed Thanha Lai with a suggestion for a spin-off from her book  Listen, Slowly.  Before we go any further, I must apologize for not using diacritical marks in this review.  Diacritical marks are VERY important in Viet Namese, as Lai's book shows.

First, the review.  All the reviews tell you that 12-year-old Mai is a California girl through and through.  When she is chosen to go with her grandmother, or Ba (there should be an accent on that "a", slanting down from left to right, I think.) to Viet Nam to learn what happened to Mai's grandfather in THE WAR, Mai is furious.  She has a life, right there in Laguna, with a BFF and possible boyfriend.  Middle school rants ensue.

But Ba, quiet, peaceful, fragile Ba, how can Mai say no to Ba?  She can't.  The two of them travel to the village where Ong and Ba grew up; where Ong and Ba were betrothed, he only 7, she just 5; where they married and started a family; where Mai finds strangers who think of her as family.  It is all so odd.

The description of village life in North Viet Nam is delightfully confusing, full of details of what people eat, how they socialize, their dress, their formal and consistent good manners, even their fulsome speech.  The village seems to operate with one mind. Everyone is very careful of each other and of the things they use.  And they are curious about the larger world and about strangers and customs. 

This description led to my suggestion.  Lai describes a facial treatment that one of the Aunts forces Mai through and how it restores Mai's skin to beauty.  Then there is the lice treatment; and a potion to thwart intestinal microbes that Mai accidentally swallows.   Although Lai describes what Mai sees as these concoctions are made, wouldn't it be awesome if there was a book about these remedies?  I'd buy it.

Back to the book.  Ba's search takes so much longer than Mai hoped.  Her infrequent forays on the Internet make Mai more homesick than ever. (Is BFF Montana really making a move on the boy that Mai likes????)  One of Mai's big lessons is to learn not to worry about things she can't change.

I want to tell someone the whole plot - the trip to Ha Noi, with her new friend, Ut.; the HUGE frog that Ut totes with her; Anh Minh, the serious, hard-working, teen translator - and the two girls who compete for Anh Minh's attention.  The wordy detective, the reluctant guard, and Ba, strong Ba, who can not be at peace until she knows.  And then... and then...the ending, heart-breaking, calming and true.

Yep.  This book goes on my Best of the Best list for 2015.  Cheers for Mai, who grows so much in this book.  Cheers for Ba, who never wavers in her search for acceptance.  Cheers for the guard and the detective, who did their very best.  Cheers for Mom and Dad.  Cheers for Anh Minh and Ut and the whole village.  And cheers for Thanha Lai for such a wonderful book.

My EYES! My EYES!

Lots of reading going on as I prepare for a book review session laughingly titled "The Best Books for Children and Teens for 2011".  AAAAAHHHHH!!!!!  How am I going to do this?
So I have read 7 or 8 books (a couple of those were picture books) in the past five days.  My favorite book of the week?....

Inside Out & Back Again by Thanhha Lai (Harper, 2011, 978-0-06-1962783)  Ha (there is a diacritical mark over the a that I can't easily reproduce, alas), her mother and her three older brothers escape Saigon as it is being seized by the North Vietnamese and move to Alabama.  10-year-old Ha suffers at the hands of her classmates.  Her whole family endures the hatred of their neighbors.  Worse than all of this is the worry that Father, who disappeared nine years before, will never find them.

Written in prose verse, this book opens the reader's eyes to how America looks to immigrants from very different cultures.  The book has touches of humor but the main story is of Ha and how she finds the strength to make friends and go on.

My second favorite book of the week....How to Save a Life by Sara Zarr.  Review to come.