When she enters a writing contest in school, her entry ends up in the hands of the Dining Editor at a prestigious New York newspaper and she’s offered a job as a food critic. During her latest kitchen experiment involving crème brûlée and a blowtorch, her family’s kitchen curtains went up in smoke and her family finally put a stop to her kitchen shenanigans. From entrées to pastries, she loves cooking anything and everything. The sweet, melty butterscotch offset the bitterness of the chocolate, and the hint of nutmeg gave the whole thing a kick.’Gladys Gatsby is a sixth grader that loves nothing more than experimenting in the kitchen. ‘Gladys took a bite of her brownie, and a slew of flavors flooded her taste buds. I gobbled this delectable treat down in less than a day, and was hungry for more.

On the other hand, I liked how Dairman showed friends who were NOT cookie-cutter duplicates of one another, but appreciated each other’s different talents and interests.Īnd, I absolutely loved Gladys, and the descriptions of the foods she ate or prepared. And while I was pleased to see how inventive Gladys was in formulating her final plan, I was sorry to see her use Charissa as she did. Her school nemesis – Charissa – was little more than a cardboard stereotype for much of the book. I did think Gladys’s parents were a little over the top they were more than clueless about their daughter’s talents and wishes, and seemed completely self-absorbed. Taking first her next door neighbor into her confidence and then her school friend Parm (who couldn’t be more different, since she eats nothing but cold cereal with milk and plain spaghetti), Gladys devises first one and then another plan to get into the city to sample the restaurant’s wares so she can write her first professional review. What a scrumptious debut! Gladys is a bright, resourceful, tenacious girl who will not let a few setbacks (like being grounded and not having any money) thwart her plans to succeed. She only has to figure out how to sneak into the city and sample enough cakes, pies, tarts and custards to write a good review. Somehow that essay gets to the food editor for the New York Standard, who thinks it is written by an adult, and Gladys suddenly has a freelance assignment to write a review of New York’s hottest new dessert bistro. When her teacher assigns an essay on “my future” Gladys writes about how she wants to be a restaurant critic. But her parents – who think microwaving tater tots is cooking, and prefer fast food takeout in any case – just don’t understand their daughter’s obsession with food and cooking. If her parents had given her the minitorch Gladys Gatsby asked last Christmas she wouldn’t have set the kitchen curtains on fire with her father’s blow torch while making crème brulee.

Stars So Sweet by Tara Dairman