Sunday, January 25, 2015

The Truth About Twinkie Pie

20839543Yeh, Kat. The Truth About Twinkie Pie
 January 27th 2015 by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
EARC from Edelweiss, paper ARC from Baker and Taylor

Sisters Delta Dawn (Didi) and Galileo Gallilei (Gigi) move from their home in the South to the East Coast after (nine years older) Didi wins a million dollars in a cooking contest. She continues to work as a hairdresser, and the two live in a small apartment above her place of employment because Didi claims a million dollars isn't a lot, and is spending it all to enroll Gigi in an exclusive private school, so that she can be educated and not have the kind of life that Didi has had so far. Gigi decides to go by Leia, since people in her old school made jokes about the sisters' names being bra sizes. Things go fairly well, with Leia making friends with a boy in her class named Trip, although she still longs for her deceased mother. The sisters have their mother's cookbook, which is full of ... interesting Southern recipes of disputable nutritive value, like the eponymous Twinkie Pie, and E-Z Cheez and Potato Chip sandwiches. The only other bit of information that Leia seems to know about her mother (who was also named Delta Dawn and worked as a hairdresser) is that she liked the sometimes defunct Revlon lipstick color, Cherries in the Snow.  When trying to order some lipstick for her sister, Leia realizes something about a family secret, and takes off with Trip to try to figure out the mystery.
Strengths: This has a great cover, and a fairly intriguing story about a girl finding herself out of her element and trying to fit in. Trip seems like a genuinely nice guy, and the little bit of romance is charming.
Weaknesses: A bit too quirky/Southern for my taste, and the mystery wasn't all that earthshaking. It might have been twenty years ago, but since it drove the whole book, it fell flat for me.

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