LORENZO, THE PIZZA-LOVING LOBSTER

Will involving kids in the cooking process help them try new foods? Lordon uses pizza-making to entice in this venture into new tastes.

After falling in love with a single slice of pizza, a lobster named Lorenzo tries his hand at re-creating the tasty treat. Unfortunately, Lorenzo cannot remember what was on the pizza, leading to repeated failures trying to recapture the treasured slice for his turtle friend Kalena. The absurd litany of unpalatable toppings includes sponge patties, jellyfish jelly, squid ink, and algae. Unsurprisingly, none of the combinations they try taste any good at all. The illustrations balance characters and scenery with speech bubbles, and they are engaging enough, although the main characters are a bit static, with cut-and-paste eyes and simple body shapes. When Kalena finds a real pizza pie, the duo surprisingly goes straight from zero to hero. “Let’s make a pizza with the correct ingredients. It’s so tasty I want more!” exclaims Lorenzo. The very next page depicts a backyard full of pizza-eating friends. Readers are never shown the process that results in the first successful pie, which leaves the author’s intent unclear: to promote pizza production? That seafood is bad? Instead, the message that pizza tastes better when shared with a friend is what remains.

Look for stronger food and friendship books than this one.