Top-notch recipes for junior top chefs.
A comprehensive cookbook designed for and tested by teen cooks.
According to the introduction, not only did thousands of teens test these recipes in their own home kitchens, but each recipe was only included in the book if at least 80% of the testers considered it a keeper. The appeal of breakfast sandwiches, pizza pockets, and cheeseburger sliders may be obvious, but the book, divided into chapters titled “Breakfast,” “Snacks,” “Lunch,” “Dinner,” “Sides,” and “Sweets,” branches out into acai smoothie bowls and blistered shishito peppers and includes food from a wide variety of culinary cultures: Onigiri, shakshuka, congee, arepas, and chana makhani are only some examples. The layout is crisp and clear, starting with ingredients and their prep, with required equipment highlighted for easy visibility. Special techniques, such as how to stem kale, are given in boxed sidebars, sometimes with photographs, and possible ingredient substitutions are both recommended and (where necessary) warned against. The front of the book offers tips on how to get started, covers elements of kitchen safety, and illustrates common techniques and equipment. The recipes themselves are tagged beginner, intermediate, advanced, and vegetarian (but not vegan). Each dish starts from basic, whole ingredients—no canned soup here—and the text often gives suggestions for how cooks can personalize or expand on it. Bright photographs show racially diverse young people and showcase the mouthwatering array of dishes.
Top-notch recipes for junior top chefs. (photo credits, conversions and equivalents, nutritional information, index) (Nonfiction. 12-18)Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-948703-95-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: America's Test Kitchen
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
Though awkward, this adaptation still makes for a hopeful and inspiring story.
This story, an adaptation for young people of the adult memoir The Other Wes Moore (2008), explores the lives of two young African-American men who share the same name and grew up impoverished on the same inner-city streets but wound up taking completely different paths.
Author Moore grew up with a devoted mother and extended family. After receiving poor grades and falling in with a bad crowd, his family pooled their limited finances to send him to Valley Forge Military Academy, where he found positive role models and became a Corps commander and star athlete. After earning an undergraduate degree, Wes attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. When the author read about the conviction of another Wes Moore for armed robbery and killing a police officer, he wanted to find out how two youths growing up at the same time in the same place could take such divergent paths. The author learns that the other Wes never had the extensive family support, the influential mentors or the lucky breaks he enjoyed. Unfortunately, the other Wes Moore is not introduced until over two-thirds of the way through the narrative. The story of the other Wes is heavily truncated and rushed, as is the author's conclusion, in which he argues earnestly and convincingly that young people can overcome the obstacles in their lives when they make the right choices and accept the support of caring adults.
Though awkward, this adaptation still makes for a hopeful and inspiring story. (Memoir. 12 & up)Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-385-74167-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
Unapologetic and unflinching: a critical read.
Through honest and powerful vignettes, Jewell’s latest stitches together a collective memoir of formative experiences of educational racism and American schooling by people of the global majority.
Anchored by the author’s narrative of navigating school as a “light-skinned Black biracial cis-female” in a working-class neighborhood of a city in New York state, the work incorporates both her experiences of being labeled and othered in school as well as the first-person experiences of people of various ages, ethnicities, races, and genders, who write about how they navigated and were affected by systemic racism in their K-12, college, and postgraduate educations. The contributors include well-known authors of young people’s literature including Joanna Ho, Minh Lê, and Randy Ribay; writers and educators such as Lorena and Roberto Germán, Torrey Maldonado, and Gayatri Sethi; and two entries by teens from Portland, Oregon. Alongside stories of segregation, mistreatment by white educators, hypervisibility, surveillance, stereotyping, pigeonholing, and exclusion, this collection asks readers to “envision what freedom in schools might be.” These bold tales of truth telling are interspersed with historical facts, definitions, and anti-racist pedagogy that emphasize and contextualize the reality that, while experiences of racism in educational systems evolve with each generation, one constant is that schools are microcosms of larger systems of inequality and institutional oppression in the world beyond classroom walls.
Unapologetic and unflinching: a critical read. (resources, recommended reading, references, about the contributors) (Nonfiction. 12-18)Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9780358638315
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Versify/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
