Monday, May 7, 2012

Bake Sale



Bake Sale
Sara Varon
First Second, 2011
$16.99, Paperback
978-1596434196
April 18th, 2012

Genre: Realistic
Age: 8+
Description:  Cupcake leads a happy life—he has a bakery, plays drums in a band, and has Eggplant as his best friend. However, when he discovers that Eggplant has a chance to meet Turkish Delight, Cupcake’s favorite baker, Cupcake is sad. Eggplant says he can come on his trip if he can make the money for a plane ticket. So Cupcake drops out of his band to open his bakery more hours and begins going to various events to sell his goods. When he finally has enough money for the trip, he learns that Eggplant can’t go because he lost his job. Doing the nice thing, Cupcake pays for Eggplant’s plane ticket. Meanwhile, he looses all will to cook anything. When Eggplant returns with spices from Turkish Delight, he helps Cupcake get his cooking groove back and they work at the bakery together.
Opinion: This is an adult graphic novel marketed at children who will find the anthropomorphic food items adorable but will be bored but the story itself. It features adult themes—jobs, getting laid off, mid-life crisis—that aren’t that interesting or relatable to kids or tweens. Also slightly disturbing is that fact that these characters are shown to be food items and they eat other food items—cannibalism. It’s also not wordless like Varon’s much better Robot Dreams

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