LESSONS IN FUSION

A cooking competition show gets Sarah to more fully explore her cultural heritage.

Sixteen-year-old Sarah Dayan-Abad is a Winnipeg girl of Ashkenazi Jewish and Filipinx descent. She attends a Hebrew immersion school and maintains a fusion cooking blog, highlighting the Jewish recipes her late Baba taught her. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Cyber Chef, a virtual cooking show for food bloggers, has become one of her favorites, inspiring her own cooking. When Sarah is offered the chance to be a last-minute sub on the show, she is told she needs to present more Filipinx recipes on her blog, forcing her to quickly dive into her mother’s Filipinx culture. As she learns more, she confronts her mother about abandoning her Filipinx heritage. Looking within herself and at her family’s histories, Sarah must learn the true meaning of fusion if she hopes to get far in the competition. The central theme in the book around discovering and accepting your own racial and cultural identities—while recognizing that other people’s perceptions may be very different and not reflect the whole story—is presented very well. The novel also depicts problematic ways that race, diversity, and equity are handled in a predominately White society, especially within the entertainment industry. Unfortunately, the writing feels scattered, with many changing viewpoints, locations, and times. Each chapter opens with a fusion recipe from Sarah’s blog, spotlighting Filipinx and Jewish cuisines.

A solid fusion of food, heritage, and social issues.