MMGM- Taco Tuesdays and Craft Love

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Marvelous Middle Grade Monday
 at 

Always in the Middle 

and #IMWAYR day 

at

Unleashing Readers

Mancillas, Mónica. Taco Tuesdays: A Wish Novel
January 7, 2025 by Scholastic Inc.
E ARC provided by Edelweiss Plus

Dulce's family restaurant, Fidelia, was started by her greatgrandmother sixty years ago, and until recently was a thriving business. With the opening of the chain restaurant, Taco World, across the street, business has been down. Dulce's whole family works there, including her older sister, Flor, who wants to study business and marketing in order to help out. Fidelia herself died a few years ago, leaving the running of the restaurant to her aunt and mother. Dulce is getting a little tired of having to spend most of her free time working at the restaurant when she would rather be enrolling in a summer art camp with her friends Marnie and Mel. When she brings the art camp up to her parents, her  mother thinks it is a great idea... to open a COOKING camp at the restaurant. Flor comes up with a curriculum, and has Dulce design flyers. Meanwhile, Julian and his mother have moved from New York City to California. He's bummed, because his parents are divorcing and he's had to leave all of his friends. Because his parents had teamed up on a popular vlog that dealt with restaurants, Julian and his mother head to Fidelia to try the food. A skateboarding accident with Mel's brother Tanner and his friend Luke goes awry, and Julian bumbs into Dulce while she is wearing a taco costume and carrying dishes. We see sparks fly from both of their perspectives. Julian loves to cook, so when his mother shows an interest in filming the camp, he doesn't complain about attending. Tanner and Luke, as well as Mel and Marnie, also enroll. Before long, Dulce and Julian stop being mad at each other and start to realize that they have a lot of things in common, including liking each other. Their friends, and even their families, give them a hard time, but this doesn't stop them from having a good time hanging out together. When Julian finds out that his father is going to come to California, and learns that his parents are interested in getting back together and possibly buying Fidelia, he's not sure what to do. Dulce eventually finds out, and is a little angry that he kept the secret from her, but the two put together a plan to try to save the restaurant. Since Flor is determined to sell tacos, Dulce looks at Fidelia's recipes and gets the students in the school to use some more traditional Mexican ingredients in tacos for their final project. Will these new flavors, along with a new social media following, be enough to save the day?
Strengths: This is from both Julian and Dulce's perspective, like Heldring's The Football Girl, AND has a great cover, which makes it the perfect book for my boys who want romance books. Also, there are plenty of descriptions of food, and a boy who cooks. There's realistic drama with the family business, as well as with Julian's parents, and also has a health scare for Dulce's grandfather, which is something that many middle school students experience. There are a reasonable number of friends involved, and even a little skateboarding, which we need to see a LOT more! Dulce and Julian even manage to save the day and share a kiss along the way. A very sweet, engaging read. 
Weaknesses: At one point, Julian wonders if Dulce thinks he's "one of those Karens or something". This has to stop. Not only does it set a bad examples for young readers about using negative stereotypes, it's a phrase that hopefully will become badly dated. While I really liked the way that Julian treated Dulce, and vice versa, I wasn't a fan of the friends and family teasing them about their relationship. Again, not behavior that we need to encourage. 
What I really think: While I am not personally a fan of the enemies--to-lovers trope (if I were Anne Shirley, I would NEVER have forgiven Gilbert!), I did like the way that the story unfolded, so if I can find this in a prebind, I will definitely purchase it. Fans of Homzie's Pumpkin Spice Secrets or Nelson's many WISH titles. The trend in middle grade lit romances seems to be skewing more toward LGBTQIA+ relationships, and while I always delicately ask what kind of romances my readers want, the vast majority are still asking for boy/girl ones. The WISH novels have just the right level of accidental hand brushing and chaste kisses. 

Why Scholastic takes all of their best titles and releases them only in paperback is still a mystery to me. 

Smith, Irene Smit and van der Hulst, Astrid . 

The Kids' Book of Craft Love: Write. Make. Play. Share. 

October 8, 2024 by Workman Kids

Copy provided by Young Adult Books Central

Book lovers who feel bad even highlighting passages or annotating text: this book is supposed to be torn apart, and the pages turned into projects! If you are familiar with Flow magazine (which originated in the Netherlands), you will know the format of this book and understand this. As someone who even had trouble using stickers on a calendar as a child, this would have made me a little anxious, even as I desperately wanted to do every single project, in order, until the book was completed! 

Divided into four chapters, Write, Make, Play, and Share, this book offers a wide range of projects for children who have a fair amount of manual dexterity. Write has journals, cards, and directions for a zine, and even has a nice calendar to cut out and assemble. Make has an adorable forest to assemble, a box, mandala stickers, embroidered postcards, and some origami instructions. Play has a small booklet in the shape of a bear, with different animals that all need outfits. This alone would have kept me occupied for hours! There are also bracelets, puzzle cubes, and a kaleidescope with some mirrored paper. Share includes notes, banners, place cards, flowers, some folded gift boxes, and even more stickers.

While the age range given by the publisher is 5-9, I would not have given this to my own children until about third or fourth grade, when their scissor skills were good enough to cut some of the smaller pieces neatly. While the scope of the projects would be appreciated by younger readers, I plan to give this book to a 7th grader who likes to do origami and create personalized greeting cards, and I think she will be very happy with the array of projects. While I didn't open all of the envelopes (which are firmly glued down), one review mentioned a needle for sewing cards. It's quite a nice yarn needle with a large eye, but children younger than third grade might benefit from supervision when using it. 

The directions are at the beginning of the chapter, because the pages with the materials need to be removed. There are not a lot of instructions, and this is another reason why this might be better used by an older child who has some previous experience with paper crafts. I've worked with a lot of middle schoolers, and very few of them can even thread sewing needles, so younger children might need more assistance with the projects, which would make a nice activity for them to do with an older sibling or with an adult. 

I've not seen anything quite like this; the paper is lovely, and there are a lot of the much coveted stickers that always seemed "too good" to use when I was young. This would make an exquisite gift for a crafty young person, and requires only basic additional supplies like colored pencils, scissors, tape, and glue.