Title: The Truth About Twinkie Pie Author: Kat Yeh
Published: January 27, 2015
Genre(s): Realistic/Contemporary
Page Count: 352
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:There's something about asking for Impossible Things. For one little second, they feel Possible.
Take two sisters making it on their own: brainy twelve-year-old GiGi and junior-high-dropout-turned-hairstylist DiDi. Add a million dollars in prize money from a national cooking contest and a move from the trailer parks of South Carolina to the North Shore of Long Island. Mix in a fancy new school, new friends and enemies, a first crush, and a generous sprinkling of family secrets.
That's the recipe for The Truth About Twinkie Pie, a voice-driven middle-grade debut about the true meaning of family and friendship.
This book has all the things I love: complex female relationships, family dysfunction, a protagonist who works her way through her mistakes, and also real-life preteen issues. The Truth About Twinkie Pie is a story that’s both adorable and serious, the kind of book that really just makes me happy to be a reader. Kat Yeh’s debut novel about a girl and her new school and the mother-shaped hole in her life was sweet and honest from start to finish.
I definitely and absolutely loved Yeh’s protagonist, GiGi Barnes (real name Galileo Galilei but she doesn’t talk about that). She’s not a perfect kid and she doesn’t always do the right thing, but growing up is messy, and teens (and the adults in their lives) make mistakes. I think that’s what The Truth About Twinkie Pie acknowledges, and it also shows the aftermath: getting up again after you’ve fallen down and patching things up. Over the course of the story, GiGi hurts her both sister and her new best friend, and is hurt in turn—and fixing things is hard, but they manage to do it. I especially loved how there was a sense of unconditional love and also trust in all the relationships in this book, though it often had to be earned and proven. It was also important, I think, that GiGi learned that perfection does not equate with happiness—also also that there really isn’t such a thing as a perfect family. Everyone has something.
Another thing I was super happy about was all the awesome lady friendships in The Truth About Twinkie Pie. The author did such an excellent job in promoting girls and their relationships. From GiGi and her sister/guardian to GiGi and the stuck-up classmate who hated her on sight, I loved and appreciated it all. There was range and nuance to all of the relationships GiGi finds and sustains in her new town.
Beyond that, there was something so true about the way Yeh dealt with being a new kid—I was in GiGi’s shoes around the same age, and our experiences were similar. Neither of us had trouble making friends, but it wasn’t a seamless transition either.
Obviously, I love a lot about this book, and the only real complaint I had was the the book ended one scene too soon. We get to the end, and GiGi and her friends make up and then she and her sister apologize to each other, but…Yeh doesn’t show them having a conversation dealing with the issues that contributed to their falling out. I really wanted GiGi to get a chance to explain to her sister how she felt smothered by expectations and really just wanted the freedom to be herself. I’m sure that conversation happened, but the author chose not to include it in the text. I didn’t quite understand why—I wanted to see that resolution and closure. I guess this is me speaking as an adult, knowing that an apology, no matter how heartfelt, doesn’t fix everything. But still.
I mean, that one missing scene aside, The Truth About Twinkie Pie is great. I loved Kat Yeh’s focus on family and friendship, and I thought GiGi was a genuine and charming young protagonist. Overall, this book was cute and heartwarming and real.
