Callie's healing heart is quickly captured by Justin and Jesse Mendocino, the two very cute twins who are working on the play with her. Callie's just getting over popular baseball jock and eighth-grader Greg, who crushed her when he left Callie to return to his girlfriend, Bonnie, the stuck-up star of the play. Seventh-grader Callie Marin is over-the-moon to be on stage crew again this year for Eucalyptus Middle School’s production of Moon over Mississippi. Many chapters end with a fun (food snobs beware) recipe from GiGi’s dead mother’s cookbook, featuring ingredients such as condensed soup or instant pudding mix.įilled with enough characters and plot for two novels, Yeh’s nimbly voiced, combination fish-out-of-water, personal transformation and emotional family tale is also stuffed with charm.įrom award winner Telgemeier ( Smile, 2010), a pitch-perfect graphic novel portrayal of a middle school musical, adroitly capturing the drama both on and offstage. The discovery of a surprising but credible family secret leads to a moving finish, though GiGi’s personality in this part of the story feels inconsistent.
Of course, not everyone in her swanky school is receptive to the girl with the hairdresser sister and Dollar Store shoes, and Yeh does a good job of making what could be clichéd characters, such as the snotty rich girl, come across as layered and original instead. But GiGi longs for friends and fun, so she concocts a different recipe for herself, starting with a new name. GiGi has always followed DiDi’s “Recipe for Success,” earning perfect grades by studying 150 percent.
So when DiDi wins a million dollars in a bake-off, she moves them 800 miles north and enrolls GiGi in the ritzy Hill Prep. GiGi is short for Galileo Galilei, and her older sister and guardian, DiDi, a beautiful, uneducated hairdresser, has always encouraged her to reach for the stars. When 12-year-old GiGi moves from a trailer park in South Carolina to an upscale community on Long Island, she decides to reinvent herself.
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